The Initiation
Kelly Fairchild is a university student who has suffered from a recurring nightmare in which a strange man is burning to death inside her childhood home. Adding to her stress, Kelly is also about to take part in her sorority's initiation ritual, which entails her and a group of pledges breaking into her wealthy father's multi-level department store after hours. Megan, the head of the sorority, comes up with the idea in hopes of getting Kelly into trouble, out of jealousy. Kelly, her friend Marcia, and roommate Alison are the three main pledges.At a sanitarium 300 miles away, several inmates break out of the building and murder a nurse. The following morning, Kelly's parents, Frances and Dwight, receive a phone call from the sanitarium notifying them of the incident. That afternoon, Kelly pitches an idea for her term paper to Peter , the graduate assistant in her psychology course. Kelly explains her dream to Peter, and tells how she had lost memory of her early childhood after falling out of a treehouse, leaving her with injuries that put her into a coma.At dinner, Frances forbids Kelly's meetings with Peter, who is attempting to analyse her nightmare. Meanwhile, while Dwight is outside starting his car, he is attacked by an unseen assailant, who impales him in the neck with a garden fork and decapitates him with a machete. Frances goes outside and sees Dwight's car driving down the road, assuming he left the house.The following night at the department store, the night porter is murdered while doing rounds. Shortly after, Kelly, Marcia, and Alison arrive there to steal the porter's uniform for their initiation pledge. The three split up, and Kelly heads to the lounge upstairs to get one of the spare uniforms. Meanwhile, Megan lets Chad, Ralph, and Andy into the department store to scare the girls. Chad and Ralph scare them by rolling a bowling ball down the hallway; the girls then attempt to leave the store, but find themselves locked inside. Meanwhile, Megan and Andy make out inside one of the shops, and begin playing hide and seek. Andy is murdered when the killer emerges from an elevator and slams a hatchet into his head. Shortly after, the killer shoots Megan through the chest with an arrow and her body collapses, breaking a vase. Kelly and Marcia hear the commotion, and run into Ralph and Chad who are hiding in a dressing room.At the university, Peter comes across newspaper clippings detailing the fire Kelly described in her dream; the articles reveal the burning man's identity as Jason Randall, a floor manager at the Fairchild department store, who was married to Frances; he believes Kelly's dream to be a memory of her biological father, Jason, being burned in an altercation with Frances' lover, Dwight, whom Kelly believes to be her real father. A recent article on the inmates' revolt at the sanitarium reveals Jason was a groundskeeper and an inmate there, and among those who escaped.Stuck inside the store, Kelly, Marcia, and Alison drink wine together with Ralph and Chad. Alison and Chad leave to use the bathroom, and Alison discovers the body of the night porter. Panicked, she runs into the men's bathroom to get Chad, and finds him in a bathroom stall with his throat slashed. Kelly goes into the bathroom to investigate, while a frantic Alison goes downstairs to the security desk. Inside the bathroom, Kelly sees her name written on the mirror in blood.Alison is viciously stabbed to death at the security desk, and the sounds of her screaming are broadcast over the store's intercom system. Meanwhile, Peter drives to the Fairchild house to tell Frances what he has discovered; Frances tells him that the police have just notified her that Dwight's mutilated body was found inside the trunk of his car, parked two blocks from his department store. At the store, Ralph is shot dead with a crossbow in front of Marcia, who flees to find Kelly. They hide in a freight elevator inside the building, which is infiltrated by the killer, who pulls Marcia into the elevator shaft as the doors close. Kelly escapes and flees into the store's boiler room, where she finds Marcia's corpse being dragged away by the killer and encounters the burned Jason Randall. He chases her to the roof, and she pushes him off, killing him.Peter and Frances arrive at the store and find Jason's body lying on the ground outside. Inside, Peter sees who he believes to be Kelly standing in the store foyer and embraces her; she then stabs him in the stomach. Kelly runs into the room, and is faced with a mirror image of herself it is her disturbed twin sister, Terry, who had been institutionalized as a child when Frances left their father and married Dwight, and whom Kelly has no memory of. Just as Terry is about to murder Kelly, she is shot to death by Frances. The film ends as Peter is taken away in an ambulance, while Kelly stares at her mother in disbelief.
cult, murder, violence, prank