Genre: Horror / Survival / Thriller
Directed by: Johannes Roberts
Starring: Jessica Barden, Dylan Minnette, Anya Taylor-Joy, Bill Skarsgård
Two decades after the first Wrong Turn, the terror has evolved—but so have the survivors.
When a group of environmental activists ventures deep into the forests of West Virginia to investigate rumors of illegal deforestation and toxic dumping, they uncover a new horror: the mutated descendants of the original cannibal clan—more organized, more ruthless, and now ruled by a single name whispered in terror…
"Mother Hollow."
Act I – Into the Forest
A team of six activists—college friends and survival vloggers—travel to the Appalachian wilderness to expose a mining corporation rumored to be poisoning the land. They are:
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Lena (Jessica Barden) – the fearless leader and environmental scientist
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Micah (Dylan Minnette) – her boyfriend, a drone operator
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Talia (Anya Taylor-Joy) – an empathic wildlife expert
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Rico (Justice Smith) – a hacker and livestreamer
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Alex (Brandon Flynn) – a skeptic and city boy
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Kylie (Storm Reid) – Lena’s younger cousin, eager to prove herself
As they enter the forest, strange signs appear: carved symbols in trees, piles of animal bones, and distant howls in the night. Their drone catches glimpses of humanoid figures in the canopy—but they vanish without a trace.
They laugh it off as paranoia.
Until one of them disappears.
They find Rico’s bloodied phone and hear screams echoing through the woods. The group panics and decides to backtrack—but the trail is gone. Their GPS devices glitch. The forest seems alive, shifting around them.
That night, they are attacked.
Not by inbred hillbillies, but by masked, silent, disfigured figures, using bone-crafted weapons and moving with eerie coordination.
Kylie is taken.
The group flees into an old mining tunnel system where Lena uncovers ancient journals from the 1940s—records of failed experiments by a military biochemist attempting to "harden" human physiology using fungal mutations found only in this forest. The cannibal clan was not just a product of incest—but the result of bioengineering gone wrong.
These “hollow people” are not entirely human anymore.
And at the center of them all is a mother figure—Mother Hollow—a once-normal woman who became host to the mutated spores, now worshipped as a god by the creatures.
With only three survivors left, Lena leads them deeper into the tunnel to find Kylie. They discover an underground “hive” of the Hollow people—where human captives are kept in suspended root-webs, slowly being infected by the spores.
Kylie is barely alive, speaking in cryptic phrases as the mutation spreads in her eyes and veins.
Mother Hollow appears—grotesque, overgrown with fungal limbs, with a whispery voice that echoes in every direction. She tells Lena, “You came to save the forest. Now you will become it.”
Micah is caught and transformed. Talia is infected trying to rescue him and begs Lena to burn the place before she turns.
With nothing left, Lena sets a firetrap in the root system. Explosions erupt as she carries Kylie out on her back.
Lena emerges from the burning hive, bloody and broken, only to be found by a rescue chopper the next morning.
Kylie is comatose.
Weeks later, Lena testifies before a congressional panel about what happened. The corporations deny involvement. The media calls it “a tragic hoax.”
Then, in the final scene, a government agent visits Kylie in the hospital.
Her eyes slowly open. They glow faintly with spore-like veins.
The screen cuts to black.
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Environmental horror: Nature corrupted and weaponized
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Body horror: Slow transformation through biological infection
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Legacy and trauma: How the past wrongs can resurface in horrifying new forms
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Mistrust of authority: Government and corporate secrets buried in the forest
“You thought you escaped the forest. The forest remembers.”
“Some paths should stay lost.”
“This time, the wrong turn was evolution.”