In 1908 London, a women's rights campaigner discovers the Assassination Bureau Limited, an organization that kills for justice. When its motives are called into question, she commissions the assassination of its chairman. Knowing that his colleagues have recently become more motivated by greed than morality, he turns the situation into a challenge for his board members: kill him or be killed.

The eminent Dr. Phibes awakens from a decade of suspended animation and heads to Egypt with the corpse of his dead wife, which he intends to resurrect by murdering people in strange and heinous ways.