In 1974, a woman is making a wax sculpture in the kitchen while her son eats breakfast in his highchair. Her husband enters with another son who is shouting and kicking. The boy is forced into a highchair and strapped in place by his father. He scratches his mother's hand, causing her sculpture to fall to the floor, she then slaps her child across the face.
In 2005, six teenagers are on their way to a highly anticipated football game in Louisiana. Night falls and the group decides to set up camp for the night. The campsite is later visited by a stranger in a pickup truck who shines his lights at the campsite, but refuses to leave or address them until one of the boys smashes a headlight with a bottle. The next morning, one of the cars fan belts is found to be damaged. The group meets a disheveled, rural man named Lester, who offers to drive two of the teens to the nearby town of Ambrose to get a new fan belt, while the rest of them go to the football game.
The two arrive at Ambrose, which is virtually a ghost town. Unable to find an attendant at the auto mechanics shop, they wander into the church, disrupting a funeral. There, they meet a mechanic named Bo, who offers to sell them a fan belt after the funeral. While waiting for the services to end, the two teens visit the wax museum, which itself is made of wax and is the central feature of the town. Afterward, they follow Bo to his house to find a proper fan belt. The teens make the realization that Bo is the stranger that had appeared at the campsite previously, but not before being attacked. The teens are separated and one of them runs to the church, only to find that the funeral is ongoing, populated only by wax sculptures. She is captured by Bo and imprisoned in a cellar, taped to a chair with her lips glued together.
The rest of the group arrives in search of their compatriota, only to be attacked as well. After most of them are dispatched, it becomes apparent that the only inhabitants of the town are the sons of the wax museums proprietors, who have been trapping their victims for the creation wax sculptures. The two owners were Siamese twins separated at birth, leaving one of them horribly disfigured and the other mentally deranged. The two remaining teens set fire in the building's basement to cut their attackers off. The fire spreads through the museum, slowly melting it down. The two teens soon kill the brotherly owners and escape from the wax museum as it melts to the ground, burying the two tragically disturbed brothers in their own work.
The next morning, the smoke from the fire has drawn help from outside and police and rescue workers sift through evidence throughout the town. The sheriff informs the group that the town has been abandoned for a decade, since its sugar mill closed down, and it doesn't even appear on maps anymore. While addressing the sheriff over the radio, a policeman indicates the existence of a previously unmentioned son of the Sinclair's. The film closes and implies that Lester, who had driven the teens to the town earlier, is the third son.