When a vacation goes awry, Carlos and Antonia are forced to stay in the state of New Mexico due to obtuse and bureaucratic new laws dictated by the federal government. Meanwhile, a serial killer, dressed vaguely as a leopard stalks the city of Santa Fe, looking for new victims. ​Loosely based on Jacques Tourneur's 1943 horror film The Leopard Man, They Cry by Night abstracts the original thriller on the horrors of Spanish/American colonialism into a portrait of 21st century Santa Fe, complete with angsty millennials, economic anxiety, and failed revolution.