The Hunger

In April 1847, a salvage team trudges through chest-deep snow to reach Truckee Lake in the Sierra Nevada, searching for Lewis Keseberg, the last known survivor of the Donner Party tragedy. They find an abandoned cabin surrounded by scattered human remains. The cabin door opens on its own. Eight months earlier, the journey that led to this horror began on the Nebraska plains.

In June 1846, a wagon train bound for California crosses the Great Plains. Charles Stanton, a bachelor from Springfield, Illinois, travels with the party, which includes the wealthy Donner and Reed families. His friend Edwin Bryant, a former newspaperman investigating Indigenous spiritual beliefs, warns that the train is moving too slowly to beat winter. A boy named Willem Nystrom vanishes from his tent. His remains are found miles up the trail, stripped nearly to the skeleton with a precision Bryant judges too deliberate for animal predation. He suggests the killer may be among them. Bryant then departs with a small group on horseback, leaving Stanton as one of the few cautious voices in the party.

George Donner, a genial but indecisive farmer, becomes the party's captain. His wife, Tamsen, collects herbs for folk remedies and is rumored to practice witchcraft. Dissatisfied in her marriage, she begins a secret affair with Stanton. Mary Graves, daughter of Franklin Graves, also draws Stanton's attention; her fiancé died before their arranged wedding, and she harbors guilt over her secret relief. Elitha Donner, George's 13-year-old stepdaughter, confides that she hears ghostly voices at night, and that at a frontier letter drop she found papers bearing repeated warnings: turn back or die.

James Reed, a Springfield businessman who fled west to escape blackmail from a former male lover, clashes with Lewis Keseberg, a volatile German emigrant, and John Snyder, the Graves family's bullying teamster, with whom Reed has entered a conflicted sexual relationship. Deep in the wilderness, Bryant learns from local tribes of the Anawai, a small, isolated group that sacrifices humans to appease a spirit near Truckee Lake. His young Paiute guide, Thomas, flees in terror after something rushes their camp at night. Bryant continues alone, sending letters warning Stanton against the Hastings Cutoff, a supposed shortcut to California.

At Fort Bridger, a dilapidated trading post, the party finds that Lansford Hastings, who promoted the cutoff in his guidebook, has already departed. Stanton suspects the fort's proprietor is concealing Bryant's warning letters. They press on and find Hastings's party stalled in the forest under armed guard. Hastings, cowering in his wagon, describes finding a girl's body ripped apart and witnessing the Anawai sacrifice a boy. He begs them to turn back.

George Donner collapses under the pressure, and Reed takes command. Luke Halloran, a young man with consumption whom Tamsen has been nursing, experiences a miraculous recovery that turns sinister: He grows aggressive and predatory, attacks Tamsen by a creek, and confesses an insatiable hunger. His eyes go fully black, his face narrows inhumanly, and Tamsen drives a knife into his throat. After weeks in the Wasatch Mountains, the party emerges onto the Great Salt Lake Desert. The crossing, expected to take one day, stretches to nearly a week. Reed loses two of his three wagons. Stanton volunteers to ride ahead to Johnson's Ranch in California for supplies.

Reed kills Snyder after Snyder threatens to expose their relationship. Tamsen suggests banishment rather than execution, and Reed is exiled; his stepdaughter Virginia later sneaks him a horse and provisions. Along the trail, the party finds Indian burial scaffolds with deliberately burned corpses and carved protective symbols. Thomas, now serving as guide, identifies these as charms against hungry spirits. That evening, feral, barely human creatures with bark-crusted skin attack Tamsen and her children. She sets one ablaze with a lantern, but the party dismisses her account.

The Donner families, now shunned, are stranded at Alder Creek when George crushes his hand in a wagon accident during a snowstorm. He develops a severe infection. Tamsen builds nightly bonfires, certain the creatures are closing in. Solomon Hook, a teenage son of George's sister-in-law Betsy Donner, is bitten by one of the creatures and transforms within days, confirming that the disease spreads through bites.

Stanton returns with supplies, finding the settlers emaciated. He confesses his past to Mary: The woman he loved, Lydia, was sexually abused by her father; Stanton claimed her pregnancy as his own to protect her, but she drowned herself, and her father later blackmailed him through Donner. Mary declares her love and faith in him.

At Truckee Lake, heavy snow traps the party. An ox found savagely wounded is slaughtered and eaten; those who consume the meat fall violently ill, exhibiting feverish aggression. Keseberg fabricates charges that Thomas is infected and has him executed by firing squad despite Elitha's and Stanton's protests. Elitha is devastated and falls ill.

Meanwhile, Bryant has been rescued by a Washoe hunting party. From them he learns of the na'it, a hunger spirit that infects survivors of its attacks with an insatiable craving for human flesh. At the prospectors' camp, he finds a tool inscribed with the name Keseberg, concluding that Lewis Keseberg's uncle likely carried the disease to the territory. If the trait runs in the family, Keseberg himself may be an asymptomatic carrier.

In December, Stanton organizes a last-ditch escape: eight people on makeshift snowshoes, including Mary, her father Franklin Graves, her sister Sarah Fosdick and brother-in-law Jay Fosdick, William Eddy, and two Miwok guides, Salvador and Luis. Franklin dies on Christmas Day. While searching for firewood, Stanton is attacked and bitten by one of the creatures. Feeling the disease enter his blood, he forces Mary to leave, smokes a last cigarette, and shoots himself with Tamsen's pearl-handled pistol. Mary hears the shot from the next ridge, stops screaming, and keeps walking.

At Alder Creek, George dies and Tamsen burns his body. She treks alone to Truckee Lake, where she discovers Bryant's intercepted letters in Keseberg's cabin, confirming everything: the disease, the Keseberg bloodline connection, warnings that could have saved the party. Keseberg reveals that roughly 40 survivors remain, kept alive because he has been butchering the dead and feeding human flesh to the group. He shows Tamsen bite marks on his arms; the creatures cannot infect him. A flashback reveals Keseberg first tasted human flesh as a boy, taught by his uncle, and has fought the inherited hunger his whole life. Tamsen makes her final choice: She mixes her remaining sleeping herbs, drinks them, and lies down, having made Keseberg promise to feed her body to the survivors, her daughters first. As she drifts off, she envisions golden wheat fields under a blue sky, and finds peace.

In March 1847, James Reed leads a rescue party from Sutter's Fort over the mountains. He pushes open the cabin door to find emaciated survivors huddled in the dark. His stepdaughter Virginia's voice emerges from the shadows: "Father?" Reed falls to his knees and reaches out his hand.