Italy, 1813. The inhabitants of an Italian village are terrorized by inexplicable episodes of violence erupting at every full moon: something is killing livestock, and the farmers are desperate. Meanwhile, young Orazio is alarmed by the strange behaviour of his older brother Giacomo. Isolated in the turbulence of adolescence and forced to suppress his artistic nature Giacomo suffers from the lack of compassion and affection that his cold, formal aristocratic family is unable to provide. When the blood lust of what the villagers now call the "Beast" claims the first human victim, a hunter is called in to scour the woods and destroy the creature he knows only too well. As dread engulfs the community Orazio continues to observe his brother's increasingly bizarre behaviour and is led to uncover the dark, ambiguous secrets tainting his ancestral history. In the meantime, at every full moon another gruesome death adds to the bloody toll. It is a race against time that will end in a revelation that Orazio would never be able to accept.