FAQ

After suffering a nervous breakdown, best-selling California crime novelist Susan Goldon (Charisma Carpenter) and her new British husband David (Paul Sculfor) move to a large old estate in the remote English countryside not far from where the brutal massacre of four campers took place in 1992. Soon after moving in, Susan begins to see strange visions, such as bloody bodies and a young man kicking a soccer ball, who appear one moment and disappear the next. Unsure whether she's seeing ghosts or having hallucinations, Susan seeks the help of a local psychic in order to assure herself that she is not having another breakdown.

Psychosis is a remake of the "Dreamhouse" episode from the movie anthology Screamtime (1983) (1986), the screenplay of which was written by British film-maker Michael Armstrong. Armstrong's story was adapted for Psychosis by British fimmaker Reg Traviss, who also directed the movie.

After accidentally killing Peck during one of her visions, Susan is committed to Broadwood Hospital for the Criminally Insane. However, her book, titled The Maniac, shoots to the top of the best-seller list, and David is shown collecting a healthy royalty payment from Susan's agent. After paying a dutiful visit to Susan at the hospital, David returns to the estate to finalize the sale to a new owner who is in the process of turning it into a Bed & Breakfast. The owner points out Josh (Justin Hawkins), a blond musician who does painting on the side, and Emily (Ty Glaser), the village girl hired to work on the gardens. She also introduces Nathan (Al Minton), a young man kicking a soccer ball in the front yard. David offers to give Emily a lift into the village and, while he waits for her to clean her hands, gets a call from his brunette honey (Katrena Rochell). He informs her that the divorce is being finalized but assures her that he's still Susan's beneficiary. As Emily gets in the car and David starts the engine, the killer (Tom Gaughan) from Susan's visions springs forward, slits David's neck, and turns on Emily. He then leaves the car and heads toward the B&B while a radio broadcast announces a search for a mass murder who just escaped from Broadwood, the same man who brutally murdered four campers in 1992. In the final scene, Susan huddles on the bed in her hospital cell, listening to the sounds of murder.

Susan was tortured by visions of a bloody massacre in her house, but no one could find any record of such events ever having taken place there. In the last scenes, we see the people whom she saw killed in her visions are actually alive and have moved into the estate whilst the serial killer, who was presumed dead in the opening sequence has actually survived, escaped from a mental hospital and begun a killing spree just as she saw it. The twist in the tail is that Susan wasn't being haunted by visions of events that had already taken place but of events that were going to take place in the future. that is, she was having premonitions of what was to come rather than seeing memories of what had already happened.

The original story as told in Screamtime runs for about 30 minutes. Psychosis has a run time of about 90 minutes, a hint that Psychosis has been heavily padded with red herrings and additional plot lines. For example, there is a lengthy plot line that involves the estate's gamekeeper Peck (Ricci Harnett) that was not part of Screamtime plotline. Susan as mentally unstable, accentuated by her previous mental breakdown, was also added to the story along with Susan being a successful crime writer and her husband being unfaithful to her and plotting her next breakdown.