The Gardner family moves to a remote farmstead in rural New England to escape the hustle of the 21st century. They are busy adapting to their new life when a meteorite crashes into their front yard, melts into the earth, and infects both the land and the properties of space-time with a strange, otherworldly colour. To their horror, the family discovers this alien force is gradually mutating every life form that it touches—including them.

On January 22, 1961, a group of Portuguese and Spanish opposition movement members seized control of the Santa Maria, a Portuguese luxury cruise liner, an operation devised by Henrique Galvão to expose the Government of Portugal as a dictatorship.