It begins when hard-headed mountain matriarch Granny Mustard decides she wants to live forever. Then she dies. Her slow-witted but equally hard-headed granddaughter, Jenkie, decides to pick up the ball and run with it, taking Granny's unperfected immortality moonshine recipe, a socially-inept friend named Bink, and dreams of fame and fortune to an abandoned, isolated trailer up in Desper Hollow.
But slow-witted doesn't stand against the terrible mountain power Granny initiated. Jenkie's experiments with the immortality moonshine only worsen the trouble with Granny's original recipe, bringing dead critters and a few stray folks back to a state of hungry, vicious, mindless animation. Now a stash of the living dead is locked up in the back of the trailer, a howling herd that has Jenkie terrified. And Armistead, one of the red-eyed living dead, seems way too alert for comfort.
Mountain resident Kathy Shaw and Hollywood reality show pitchman Jack Carroll find themselves caught up in the growing terror surrounding Desper Hollow. They can't avoid it and must face it head-on. So, too, must Armistead, who fights the fog of his ghastly condition to discover the truth of who he really is.