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Anna and her slacker boyfriend go to work for the creepy, reclusive Joseph Rorret, who's just opened a movie theater that plays only classic English-language thrillers. Rorret obsessively spies on the audiences in his theater, savoring the fearful reactions of pretty women, then later tracking them down, dating and murdering them. As Anna fearfully investigates his sinister doings, one of Rorret's intended victims turns out to be a little stranger even than him....

Towards the end of the sixteenth century, a group of musicians accompany a young woman bitten by a tarantula, Anna, on a pilgrimage to San Paolo di Galatina in the north of Puglia. During their journey they meet some extraordinary characters and experience a number of adventures, but the most important personage they meet along the away is the Pope's envoy who is travelling to San Paolo to investigate the violent crisis that is shaking the region and which has taken the form of a kind of exorcism accompanied by dancing and music called "tarantism". As he tries to explain to the faithful that the bite of a tarantula can not be the cause of such grave upheavals, the bishop finds himself the involuntary witness of the power of this extraordinary phenomenon. As to Anna and her musician friends their only remedy is the age-old archaic tradition of their forefathers.