Seventeen-year-old Richard and his parents take their annual seaside holiday in a guesthouse on England's east coast in the 1950s. Julia, a teenage girl holidaying with her parents in a nearby guesthouse, catches Richard's eye, but her Dutch friend Anna is intent on causing trouble.

A bookshop clerk starts seeing the disfigured killer from her favorite 1950s pulp novels come to life and start killing people around her.