Plot
When shown a house that has recently come on the market that fits their price range, the Bowen family purchases it and moves in. Their house was built on an old cemetery, although the property developer was supposed to have relocated the human remains.
The first night, they hear eerie noises in the walls, and 9-year-old Griffin Bowen finds a box containing clown dolls that had been left at the house. In the middle of the night, the lights and electronic devices start turning on and off, as an unseen force appears to move through the home. The commotion wakes Griffin, who finds his 6-year-old sister Maddy in the living room talking to the static on the television. She tells Griffin someone is coming, and he attempts to unplug the TV, causing the lights to go out of control. Maddy later says "They're here" while touching the television screen.
The following evening, Griffin's parents, Eric and Amy, go to dinner with friends, leaving their three children at home. Kendra, Griffin's 16-year-old sister, wakes up to a sound in the laundry room. While investigating the noise, the floor cracks and a corpse's hand emerges. It grabs onto her ankle, but she manages to pull herself up. Meanwhile, the dolls seem to be moving by themselves. One of the dolls attacks Griffin, who destroys it and runs from his bedroom. He finds Maddy, scared, and tells her to stay in her room while he goes to look for Kendra. Maddy is then lured by the light from her lamp and a stuffed toy into her closet, becoming lost in an endless black void. As she turns to see her bedroom drifting away further, ghosts drag her into the darkness. Meanwhile, the branches of an old willow tree outside their house grab Griffin through a window and pull him outside. Amy and Eric arrive home to see Griffin tangled in the branches, which release their grip when they come close, while Kendra tells them that she cannot find Maddy.
The family hears Maddy's voice emanating from the television. Amy places her hand on the screen. Maddy's static hand then appears to be touching Amy's hand from the other side of the TV screen. Amy and Griffin then visit the Paranormal Research department for help. The staff set up equipment in the house and install GPS devices on everyone. During the setup, one of the installers, Boyd, is frightened by the spirits while drilling a hole into Maddy's closet wall. While trying to contact Maddy, Eric destroys the closet wall, throwing a section of a broken table into the void beyond the closet; the table segment falls back into the living room (nearly crushing Griffin), revealing a potential portal for Maddy to escape through. The haunting is caused by a poltergeist. The lead investigator, Dr. Brooke Powell, decides to call her ex-husband, occult specialist and television personality, Carrigan Burke.
Carrigan explains that Maddy is a possible psychic, able to communicate with spirits. The ghosts are trapped and angry because only the headstones were transported to the new cemetery, but the bodies remain; they plan on using Maddy "to free them from purgatory". To get Maddy back, Carrigan anchors a rope in Maddy's room and tosses it into the vortex. They attempt to use Griffin's toy drone to guide Maddy out, but when it locates Maddy inside the void, the ghosts put it out of service. Griffin, guilt-ridden over leaving Maddy alone in the first place, goes through the portal. When he finds Maddy, the ghosts attempt to destroy the rope to trap them, but Griffin and Maddy manage to return through the portal into the house.
The family get in their car and begin to leave, but the ghosts drag them back into the house, flipping the car in the process in order to abduct Maddy. The family saves her from being pulled into the portal, and Carrigan decides that he must go into the vortex and lead the spirits into the light. The Bowens flee the neighborhood as the spirits destroy the house, soaring into the sky as a beacon of light. Later, Dr. Powell and her team manage to locate Burke's GPS in the shattered remains of the house.
As the Bowens look for a new house, the realtor shows them one with much closet space and an old tree in the backyard, but the Bowens drive away. Meanwhile, Carrigan starts hosting his ghost program with Dr. Powell.
