The film opens at an old fire tower somewhere in the woods. The voice of several young men can be heard, and one of them grabs a necklace from the building. After they leave, a large, hulking man called Johnny (Ry Barrett) emerges from the earth and begins to walk away from the tower.
Johnny walks farther out of the woods until he comes across a long-rotted animal carcass brought down by a trap. He walks until he comes upon a shed belonging to a man named Chuck (Timothy Paul McCarthy). Johnny enters and sees a necklace that he thinks is his, but Chuck fires his rifle at him. Johnny disarms Chuck and frightens him into running outside, where his leg gets caught in a trap. Johnny kills Chuck (happens offscreen but it’s implied he ripped Chuck’s eyes out) before going back into the shed and seeing the necklace isn’t his. He sees a vision of his father in the mirror, telling him the necklace is important in his family.
As night falls, Johnny continues going through the woods until he sees the young men from earlier, now joined by their girlfriends. Johnny follows them as they settle into a nearby cabin. There are seven of them – Kris (Andrea Pavlovic), her boyfriend Colt (Cameron Love), girlfriends Brodie (Lea Rose Sebastianis) and Aurora (Charlotte Creaghan), plus Troy (Liam Leone), Ehren (Sam Roulston), and Evan (Alexander Oliver). There appear to be some tensions between the group since the rest aren’t too fond of Colt for how much of a dick he can be.
The friends gather around a campfire while Johnny watches them from the trees. Ehren then tells them the story about Johnny. The location where they are staying used to be the grounds of a campsite where Johnny, then a mentally disabled child, used to attend and play with toys while being picked on by the lumberjacks who worked in the area. After one of the men slipped on one of Johnny’s toy cars, the men played a prank on him by saying that there were toys at the top of the fire tower, but they were there to prank him instead. Johnny got startled and fell off the tower to his death, so the men put a firefighter mask on him (the same used to scare him) and made it seem like he was playing and had an accident. Johnny’s father figured everything out and went to confront the men, leading to a fight where his father was killed, and the men claimed self-defense. Sometime later, the men were all discovered brutally murdered and hacked apart, leading many to believe that it was Johnny’s spirit having returned for revenge.
Before everybody goes back inside, Ehren complains to Kris about bringing Colt to the trip. The others then tease Ehren as he says he is going to have a smoke, but they think he is going to hit on some girls at the gas station they stopped at. Johnny catches Ehren and used a saw to sever the top half of Ehren’s head from his body. Johnny takes the head and body, using them to break into the ranger station and leave Ehren’s remains there. Johnny then grabs a firefighter mask, an axe, and a hook attached to a chain.
The next morning, Johnny sees Brodie and Aurora by the lake. Brodie teases Aurora about joining her, while the latter chooses to do yoga instead. Johnny goes underwater and manages to drag Brodie underneath until she drowns. He then goes to find Aurora by the cliffside. When she sees Johnny, she tries to run, only to realize there isn’t much place to go past the edge of the cliff. Johnny impales Aurora with the hook through her stomach, then he jams the hook into her head, and THEN pulls the hook so that Aurora’s whole head and spinal column go through the hole in her stomach until she becomes a human pretzel. Then Johnny rolls her body down the cliff.
Johnny stops for a moment and takes his mask off, where we finally get a look at his hideously scarred and decomposed face, as he plays with one of his toy cars. He then hears the voices of the other teens, as they are concerned with not seeing Ehren, Brodie, and Aurora for a while. Colt and Kris go to the ranger station while Troy and Evan stay behind. Johnny goes after Troy because he saw him put the necklace in his pocket the night before. Johnny manages to jam his axe into Troy’s leg before Evan fires a rifle at him. He makes a tourniquet for Troy’s leg and starts to run, but Johnny gets up and hurls the axe into Evan’s head before grabbing a huge rock and using it to squash Troy’s head. Johnny searches Troy’s body but doesn’t find the necklace.
Kris and Colt return after finding Ehren’s corpse at the station, and Johnny sees that Kris is wearing the necklace. He throws the axe at her but she dodges it before running away with Colt.
It gets dark again, and Johnny manages to track Colt and Kris down as they meet with the local Ranger (Reece Presley). He knows that the necklace belonged to Johnny’s mother and that it was the only thing keeping his soul at rest. The last time Johnny woke up and caused a massacre, the Ranger’s father was the sole survivor. They see Johnny, and the Ranger shoots him, but he knows it’s only going to keep him down for so long. The Ranger instructs Kris and Colt to grab chains to hold Johnny down, but as the Ranger passes the rifle to Colt, Johnny grabs the rifle, forcing Kris and Colt to run. The Ranger isn’t as lucky and gets brought down after Johnny shatters his spine. He then drags the Ranger inside and uses a machine for chopping wooden logs to dismember and decapitate the Ranger.
Kris and Colt realize the only way to stop Johnny is to return the necklace to the fire tower. They lure Johnny there and wait for him before Colt tries to create a distraction. Kris gets ready with a bear trap and a canister of gas. Colt appears from behind Johnny to taunt him before Johnny swings the axe into Colt’s face and head over and over again. Kris leaves the necklace on the canister and starts to run.
Kris runs and runs until she injures her leg. She makes it onto the road and flags a car down. The driver (Lauren-Marie Taylor) helps Kris and drives her toward town. She asks Kris questions to make sure she is lucid, but Kris only suggests that she was attacked by an animal. The woman then tells Kris about her brother who was involved in a bear attack in the woods (it’s unclear if she’s really talking about a bear or Johnny) and managed to survive while the bear disappeared. She tells Kris that she will be okay, just like her brother was. When she notices Kris appearing to lose consciousness, the woman pulls over to tend to Kris’s leg, while Kris grows fearful that Johnny will find them. She looks into the woods, waiting to see if he might appear.
The final shot shows the bear trap and canister where Kris left it, only Johnny’s necklace is now gone.
