In the small town of Larkin, Texas, the siblings Lynn Page and Lucas Page grew up under the shadow of their vanished parents, a videography duo whose mysterious illness and death still haunt the community. Lynn moved away years ago, but she returns at Lucas’s urging as strange phenomena begin to surface around their old property. The trouble starts with a disturbing VHS tape that appears on their homestead, showing a shadowy figure entering the house in the dead of night, hypnotizing Lucas, and shoving an object into his mouth before vanishing. This eerie recording goes viral, pulling Lucas deeper into the mystery, and he begins to suspect a link to a local reverend.
Initially, Lynn is wary; she suspects the entire footage is a hoax and worries about the harassment Lucas’s online followers bring. Yet when Lucas becomes unreachable, she returns to help and finds him catatonic in his own home while he studies another video Lucas had shown her—this one depicting CCTV footage of Larkin’s main street. In it, pedestrians freeze in place, a phenomenon that culminates in a passing van striking a person as the crowd collapses into silence. Frighteningly, witnesses remember the death but cannot recall being present, and, like Lucas, they also lose consciousness while watching, though Lynn is somehow immune.
To seek answers, the siblings share copies of their tapes with others, but forensic analysis reveals nothing concrete beyond an inexplicable, barely perceptible low note that the human ear cannot detect. A turning point comes when Lynn analyzes a recording of one of Reverend Endicott Carr’s sermons; another catatonic episode unfolds, and a stranger who remains unaffected by the phenomenon calmly walks out in the middle of the sermon. Wendy, Lucas’s ex-girlfriend who acts as a surrogate for Carr, points to Carr as a recent visitor and a known patron of the local barbecue joint.
Lucas eventually heads to the barbecue, where the disturbing truth begins to unfold. He witnesses Winston Boon—the town’s barbecue owner—being captured by a hooded figure who renders him unconscious. The stranger trash talks the town’s turmoil and, once Boon is bound, Lucas charges in, using the hood against the attacker and tying him up. Lynn and Wendy arrive to confront the mystery man, who speaks with the confidence of someone who understands the town’s strange happenings. Boon, Wendy, and Lucas all fall unconscious, and Boon begins to bleed from a wound the stranger has inflicted. Boon later pulls a wormlike creature from a wound, explaining that the intruder is “feeding” before the figure departs.
Back at Lucas’s house, the trio is interrupted again by the Stranger. He warns Lucas that his viral videos have put him in danger and then reveals the core truth: the townspeople of Larkin have been implanted with worms that allow Reverend Endicott Carr to remotely feed on their blood. The Stranger learns that Wendy is pregnant with Carr’s child, and she lacks the worm holes that others possess—indicating Carr has given her a different parasite and is feeding off both of them. After a brutal encounter with a possessed Wendy, the Stranger escapes but later abducts her from her apartment.
Carr, sensing Wendy’s peril, goes after the Stranger where Wendy is held. The Stranger, however, declares that his goal is not to save the town but to seize the controlling parasite for himself, even offering to spare the townspeople if the baby’s safety can be ensured. In a savage moment, he slits Wendy’s throat, but Carr uses his parasite to heal the wound from afar, and the Stranger seizes the opportunity to steal Carr’s parasite.
As Carr is mortally wounded, Lynn pursues the mutating Stranger to a room beneath the town that contains a descending spiral staircase. It seems to house the being that birthed the parasites, but Lynn is forced to flee as the parasites begin to rise. Carr collapses and catches fire, and the town briefly returns to normal, though the Stranger vanishes from sight.
Wendy delivers a seemingly healthy baby and places him for adoption, while Lynn and Lucas uncover a trove of Carr’s tapes. The recordings reveal that Carr planted the parasites in the residents, including Lynn, and that the Stranger’s coded journals and hood have lost their power. Lynn cannot explain why she remained immune or the Stranger’s involvement, but she surmises that Carr had been feeding on Larkin’s residents in the middle of the night and had to intensify daytime feedings to nurture Wendy’s child. She believes Carr engineered events to lure Wendy into becoming his surrogate, and that her own parents—who helped set up Carr’s recording equipment—were sickened and killed to cover his tracks. They did manage to save a tape that Lucas found, hoping it would one day reveal the truth.
In the end, the town appears to return to normal, the lurid mystery resolved, and life moves forward with the quiet weight of what happened lingering in memory. The fate of the Stranger remains unresolved, leaving questions about how far the parasite’s reach extends and what other doors Carr’s experiments might have opened.
