Based on the Starkweather-Fugate killing spree of 1958, in which a fifteen-year-old girl and her twenty-five-year-old boyfriend slaughtered her entire family and several others in the Dakota badlands.

"Frank Capra adapted a hit stage play for this marvelous screwball meeting of the madcap and the macabre. On Halloween, newly married drama critic Mortimer Brewster returns home to Brooklyn, where his adorably dotty aunts greet him with love, sweetness ... and a grisly surprise: the corpses buried in their cellar. A bugle-playing brother who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt, a crazed criminal who's a dead ringer for Boris Karloff, and a seriously slippery...

Louis Mazzini seeks to avenge his mother's disinheritance by ascending to her family's dukedom. To do this, he must kill eight of his relatives in the d'Ascoyne family.

Nineteenth-century English author James Rankin believes that the wrong man has hanged twenty years earlier for a series of murders, but his investigations lead him to a horrible and, for him, gruesomely inescapable secret.