When struggling, out of work actor Michael Dorsey secretly adopts a female alter ego – Dorothy Michaels – in order to land a part in a daytime drama, he unwittingly becomes a feminist icon and ends up in a romantic pickle.
A pathologist experiments with a deaf-mute woman who is unable to scream to prove that humans die of fright due to an organism he names The Tingler that lives within each person on the spinal cord and is suppressed only when people scream when scared.