In a 19th-century European village, a young man about to be married is whisked away to the underworld and wed to a mysterious corpse bride, while his real bride waits bereft in the land of the living.

Vampire Barnabas Collins is inadvertently freed from his tomb and emerges into the very changed world of 1972. He returns to Collinwood Manor to find that his once-grand estate and family have fallen into ruin.