Obscura

Van Diemens Land 1870. William Morier is a 12-year-old mortician enraptured by the beautiful ghost-conjuring sisters Catherine and Annabel White. One day Annabels corpse arrives at Williams funeral home - her death a mystery. A decade later William marries Catherine who confesses to her charlatan conjuring act as a young girl. When she suffers a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy William is desperate to raise the cash to pay for her operation. William becomes a fraudulent spirit photographer. He sneaks into morgues and hospitals to photograph the corpses of rich men. He props them up with wooden stakes and uses his morticians skills to bring them back to life. Then he visits their widows promising he can sense their husbands spirit. He shoots the widow using the same photographic plate and superimposes the dead man so he appears to haunt the scene. The widows splurge their inherited fortunes on these spirit photographs.But when a police officer discovers one of the spirits from Williams photos alive and working as a butcher downtown William sinks to grave-digging body-snatching depravity to keep the scam alive.