As a boy, a reclusive and antisocial Sufferton resident, Max Seed, was disfigured in a school bus crash that killed everyone else involved in it. In 1973, Seed began torturing and murdering people, filming some of his victims starving to death in his locked basement, and ultimately racking up a bodycount of 666. In 1979, Seed is arrested by Detective Matt Bishop in a siege that claims the lives of five of Bishop's fellow officers. Seed is sentenced to death by electric chair, and incarcerated on an island prison, where he is a model inmate, only acting out when he kills three guards who try to rape him.
On Seed's execution date, the electric chair fails to kill him after two shocks. Not wanting Seed to be released due to a state law that says any convicted criminal who survives three jolts of 15,000 volts each for 45 seconds walks, the prison staff and Bishop declare Seed dead and bury him alive in the prison cemetery. A few hours later, Seed digs his way out of his grave and returns to the prison, where he kills the executioner, doctor, and warden before swimming back to the mainland. The next day, while investigating the massacre, Bishop realizes Seed was responsible when he discovers the serial killer's empty cemetery plot.
Over the course of several months Seed kills dozens of people, with one long shot showing him beating a bound woman with a lumberjack's axe for five straight minutes. One day, a videotape showing Bishop's house is sent to the detective's office. Knowing this means Seed is going to go after his family, Bishop races home, finding his wife, Sandy, and daughter, Emily, gone, and the four officers charged with guarding the house dismembered in the bathroom.
Driving to Seed's old residence, Bishop is lured into a basement room containing a television and a video camera, and locked inside. The television turns on, and depicts Seed with Sandy and Emily. Emily informs Bishop that Seed wants Bishop to shoot himself. When Bishop hesitates, Seed kills Sandy with a nail gun, prompting Bishop into shooting himself in the head, believing that doing so will make Seed release his daughter. Instead, Seed takes the daughter to the room containing her father's corpse, and locks her in it. As Emily sobs for her parents, the film ends.
Who are the ones who declare Seed dead?
prison staff and Bishop