MANHATTAN BABY

On holiday in Egypt with her archaeologist father George and journalist mother Emily, nine-year-old Susie Hacker is approached by a mysterious blind woman who gives her an amulet. Soon after, George becomes blind when he enters a previously unexplored tomb. His vision returns, however, upon returning to New York City. Susie, her younger brother Tommy, and their au pair, Jamie Lee, are affected by the amulet, gaining supernatural access to dimensional doorways. When George's eyesight returns, he describes the design on the wall of the tomb he'd entered to a colleague named Wiler.

At her office, Emily and a colleague, Luke, are working on an article about the events in Egypt when a panicked Jamie Lee phones to say the children are locked in their bedroom. Emily and Luke arrive at the house, but when Luke tries to unlock the door, he is sucked into a dimensional portal, appearing amidst the vast, arid Egyptian desert, where he later dies of dehydration. The Hackers treat Luke's disappearance as a practical joke.

Jamie Lee takes the children to Central Park, where she takes photos of them. A woman picks up a discarded Polaroid of Susie that shows nothing but the amulet against the grassy background. The woman contacts a man called Adrian Marcato, and the next day she drops the Polaroid, now containing Marcato's contact details, down to Mrs. Hacker from a window.

The children appear and disappear from their bedrooms on what Tommy calls "voyages." When Jamie Lee disappears after entering Tommy's room, he tells his mother that she has not come back from her voyage. That evening, as Wiler studies a photograph of the amulet, he is fatally bitten by a cobra that appears in his office. The photo reappears in Susie's hand as she recovers from a mysterious fit.

The Hackers track down Marcato to his antique shop. He tells them about the evil symbolism of the amulet and suggests that Susie has absorbed its energy. When George and Emily find it in Susie's bedroom drawer, she appears to them glowing with an unearthly blue light and then faints. Marcato is called to their apartment to examine Susie, but her inner voice possesses him crying for help and falls to the ground, bleeding and foaming at the mouth. He regains consciousness and successfully links minds briefly with George, showing him a glimpse into the eldritch Egypt his children have been visiting.

George and Emily take Susie to a nearby hospital where the physician, Dr. Forrester, examines her. An X-ray shows the dark shape of a hooded cobra mark inside her chest. While Emily maintains a bedside vigil for the near-comatose Susie, Tommy is alone in the apartment. Suddenly, Jamie Lee turns up, bursting through a wall as a reanimated rotting cadaver before she drops dead. A strange blue light of negative energy flows from Tommy, the bedridden Susie, and the dimensional doorways and channels into Marcato's home, where he is reciting an ancient Egyptian spell.

George goes to see Marcato, who tells him that he can stop worrying about his children. Marcato has channeled the evil energy away from the children with the spell, and the curse is now on him. He gives George the amulet and tells him to discard it so the curse will not affect anyone else. That night, Marcato is killed at his shop by the reanimated carcasses of his stuffed birds. A healed Susie wakes up with her mother by her bedside at the hospital. The following morning, George, following Marcato's last suggestion, flings the amulet into the East River, ending their ordeal.

In the final scene back in Egypt, the mystical blind woman again appears and gives the same amulet to another young girl, intending to continue the curse for the forces of darkness, bringing it full circle.

The curse linked to the amulet leads to more deaths and supernatural chaos, culminating in Susie's possession and a final confrontation involving the family, Marcato, and the lingering evil.

The film's ending reinforces Fulci's themes of inescapable supernatural doom and the dangers of meddling with ancient forces. Rather than resolving neatly, the narrative closes on lingering menace, leaving the fate of the characters and the curse ambiguous, emblematic of Fulci's penchant for open-ended horror.