A model family in suburban America, parents and three children, live a quiet middle-class life. The little girl, however, is different, sometimes seeming to communicate with the television set. One stormy night the little girl sleeps in bed with parents, but gets up in the middle of the night to watch the television set lose picture. She hears a voice talking to her and then it makes the whole room vibrate. The next day the mother sees the dog on the bed seemingly obeying orders from above. She is cleaning in the kitchen, turns around for a moment and finds the chairs one on top of the other on the table-the only one present is the child. When the father comes home, the mother has her perform a series of experiments in the presence of the father. There and then the parents are not too concerned, but one day all hell breaks loose in the house, and the little girl disappears in a tornado that swiftly drifts away into the sky. The house is completely demolished, the pool drained, the saplings torn down. The parents search everywhere for the little girl without finding her, until the brother hears her voice coming--from the television set. The parents call experts in parapsychological phenomena to observe the strange phenomena occurring in the house, particularly in the little girl's room, where all objects float in the air continuously. The experts conclude that this is a poltergeist phenomenon: the little girl is alive and is still in the house. The only way to communicate with her seems to be the television set. Experts try to make her materialize but fail as the house is shaken by violent turbulence. The experts stand guard day and night with their equipment. One night everyone sees a spirit coming down the stairs, and cameras have captured dozens of them. The father is invited by his employer to visit the site where they are going to build new houses and thus discovers that the entire area had once been a cemetery-the graves were moved to make way for houses. The experts then bring in a dwarf exorcist who engages in a demonic struggle with the spirits and manages to bring the little girl back to the world of the living. Serenity seems to have returned to the house, and the father prepares to move out. But a few days later the spirits return. The mother is taking a bath and the children are already in bed. A toy pounces on the little brother under the child`s unyielding gaze. An invisible being grabs the mother and flies her across the room. A monster throws her down the ladder. The mother comes out of the house to seek help in the rain but slips into the pool, which has turned into a mud puddle and is infested with skeletons. The mother, aided by a neighbor, returns to the house and enters the child`s room, which is in the grip of a hurricane. She saves the children just a moment before the monster sucks them away. When her father arrives, the house is shrouded in lightning and the floors of the rooms are torn up by skeletons. He realizes that the builder, when he moved the cemetery, merely moved the headstones, and left the dead where they were. The family jumps into the car and flees as skeletons emerge from all the houses in the neighborhood, uprooting entire houses.

Invaders from Mars (1986) was a remake of William Cameron Menzies' sci-fi thriller Invaders from Mars (1953) about hostile and malevolent aliens.