In the remote woods around Camp Blackwood, a tranquil moment between Sally and her photographer companion Victor is shattered when a figure in a boiler suit and clown mask lunges at them with a machete. The attack ends with Victor slain and Sally fleeing through the trees as the assailant closes in, and the scene cuts to the opening credits.
The story then shifts to a quartet heading toward the infamous camp. Tricia is unsure about the trip, uneasy after headlines about Sally’s disappearance and the discovery of her car near Camp Blackwood. Her partner Steve, along with Jay and Nicole, push ahead, convinced the trip will be a harmless escape. They pile into Jay’s car and drive to the secluded site, hoping to leave their worries behind.
Along the road, two deer hunters, Gus and George, stumble upon Sally—bloodied but alive—only for the clown to reappear and murder them, restoring the fear that had initially opened the film.
As they reach the area, the group stops by the roadside for directions and encounters a quirky local, Thatcher. He needles them about loud music, trash, and disrespect to the locals, but also drops a warning about the clown before grudgingly giving directions to Camp Blood.
Inside the woods, they meet their guide, a no-nonsense, butch woman named Harris, who seems oddly drawn to Nicole and keeps an unsettling watch on the group. Tricia asks about the clown and the camp’s nickname, but Harris brushes off the questions, insisting she doesn’t know more than the locals.
That night, as the group settles into camp life, Harris shares the camp’s ghostly history. Twenty years earlier, a man named Stanley Cunningham discovered his girlfriend Marylou in bed with another man, Nathan. In a rage, Stanley strapped them into the trunk of his car, donned a clown mask, and drove them to Camp Blood where he killed them. The bodies were found weeks later, and Stanley disappeared without a trace. Over the years, people have vanished and some townsfolk claim to glimpse the clown wandering the woods. The four friends initially dismiss it as a chilling tale, though Tricia feels a creeping chill.
Come morning, the group wakes to a grisly sight: Harris’s burnt, lifeless body left near the fire. Panic erupts as Tricia fears the legend might be real after all. Steve tries to calm her, insisting it’s just a story Harris made up, but the danger remains hidden in the trees. When Nicole sprains her ankle, the group must carry her, and the tension escalates as the clown appears, engaging Steve in a brutal struggle during which Steve is hacked by the machete. The attack also wounds Tricia and forces Jay to back away as the clown carries Nicole off. In the chaos, Jay and Tricia both fight for control of Steve’s survival knife; Jay ultimately pulls away and attempts to rescue Nicole, but in a desperate moment Nicole is killed when Jay unintentionally stabs her.
The killer then turns on Jay, who, driven near madness, allows the clown to snap his neck. Tricia eventually makes her way back toward Jay’s car, only to be confronted by Thatcher, who confesses the clown story was a locals’ ruse meant to scare away visitors. When the clown appears, Thatcher tries to flee in Jay’s car, but in his anger he accidentally runs down the clown, leaving Thatcher distraught. Tricia seizes the moment and kills Thatcher with the machete, then unmasks the killer—revealing Harris in the clown’s clothes.
As Tricia escapes in the car, Harris slinks back into the mask and seemingly reappears in the backseat, prompting Tricia to strike again and kill her. In a frenzied escape, she drives away, only to be haunted by a vision of the clown in the car and to lose consciousness in the night.
Tricia awakes in a padded room, a doctor and detective visiting to question her. Four days have passed since the police found her, and she has been catatonic. She recounts the victims and insists Harris was the clown, the murderer in disguise. The detective notes that no clown was found, but Harris Stanley’s blood stains are found on Tricia’s hands, on her face, and on Jay’s car when they located her. Tricia realizes that Harris Stanley is the same person as Stanley Cunningham from the camp’s legend, and that Harris used the clown myth to avoid capture. Yet the townspeople maintain that Marylou and Nathan were never found, and Camp Blood remains a story to frighten tourists. Faced with this uncertainty, the authorities question whether Tricia is merely traumatized and unreliable, and she fears she will be charged with the killings. As she struggles to articulate the truth, a nurse administers a sedative, and the room darkens as Tricia’s vision of the clown returns.
