“This is a true story. It happened right here in my town two years ago.”

At 2:17 in the morning, 17 kids ran out of their homes into the darkness. Nobody knew why, except for two.

Nobody knew why their kids went missing or where they were. “What was making them leave?” “How come Alex was the only one left out of the whole class?” “ Who did it?” So many questions, with little to no answers.

Julia Galner walked into her school expecting to have a productive day, but then walked into an empty classroom with one student. Cops soon swarmed the school with questions. With the whole town spiraling, more and more people went missing. Galner goes on a date with her cop friend, and he goes missing the next day. Everyone is pointing at Galner, her car gets vandalized, and people are banging on her door. Parents are angry at her and are blaming her.

One parent, Archer Graff, decides that he’s fed up, and he misses his daughter so much. He decides to start his own investigation and gets closer to the answer than any cop. Meanwhile, the Cop that Galner went out with, Paul Morgan. Earlier in the day, he arrested someone with potential answers to the 17 missing kids. His name is James, and he’s a high school dropout addicted to heroin. He said when he saw the 17 kids, he thought he was hallucinating due to the heroin use. The next day, Morgan asks James to take them to where he saw the kids. They didn’t come out the same or even at all.

Out of the class of 18, Alex Lily is the only one left. Galner was given paid time off to hopefully help with the harassment of other people. She was worried about Alex; his parents had stopped picking him up, and he started to take the bus home and became very quiet. Galner followed his bus home and waited until he got off the bus, and asked to see if he was okay, and told him that it was a safe place. He didn’t say a word and ran to his house. Glaner tried to get his attention, but the house got hers. She saw his house boarded up with newspaper and no lights on, with the door opening by itself.

Soon enough, people became suspicious of Alex, and the principal requested a parent-teacher meeting to be scheduled. Instead of his parents showing up at his aunt, Gladys showed up and said his parents were unwell. This is when the truth comes out. They request a home check and find out that Gladys has been doing rituals to make herself “feel better”. Galner is part of the home check and sees his parents unresponsive, but alert.

Her rituals consist of taking hair, wrapping it around a stick, and pricking herself to bleed, then she smears the blood all over the stick to be able to take control of them. She asks Alex to take something from everyone in his class to help her feel better because she told Alex that she thought his parents would help, but it wasn’t strong enough. It was 2:17 in the morning, and the kids came running to the door.
Fast forward to when they did the home check. Galner and Asher join forces and help Alex. Alex finds Gladys mid-ritual and realizes his aunt is evil. He reverses the ritual on these kids and sets them free. They go after Gladys and kill her, and they are officially free, but they will never be back to normal.