Deep in the woods outside of Cherry Falls, Virginia, Rod Harper, Jesse Bradford and Stacy Twelfmann, Bre Blair, share a quiet moment in a car when a dark-haired woman appears and murders them both, setting a chilling prelude to a town-wide mystery. In the town proper, Jody Marken, Brittany Murphy, the sheriff’s daughter, is with her boyfriend Kenny, Gabriel Mann, who muses that it might be time to “see other people.” Jody then returns home to find her father, Sherrif Brent Marken, Michael Biehn, upset that she’s out past her curfew, and Brent and his deputies begin a cautious but urgent investigation into the killings, noticing that the killer carves the word “virgin” into each victim.
At school, the town’s English teacher, Leonard Marliston, Jay Mohr, pushes Brent to share details openly so the community can move past secrecy. The murders continue as Annette Duwald, Clementine Ford, a fellow student who is also a virgin, is killed in the same brutal manner. To address growing fear, Brent holds a high-school meeting for parents about the nature of the crimes; Jody and her friend Timmy, who had stayed late at school, witness the gathering. After Timmy borrows Jody’s cell phone and heads off to the stairwell, Jody descends to find him dead in a locker room and is confronted by the killer, though she manages to escape.
Back at the station, Jody describes the killer to an officer, who sketches a composite. Brent secretly confides in his old friend Tom Sisler, the current high school principal, that the suspect resembles someone named “Lora Lee Sherman.” The two men’ anxiety is palpable, and Jody overhears their uneasy conversation. As the town reacts to the killings, Jody and Kenny mend their relationship, while the history of Lora Lee Sherman is recounted: twenty-five years earlier, Lora Lee was a loner who claimed four popular boys raped her one night; her family and community dismissed her cries, and she vanished from the area.
A stark warning emerges when the town’s students converge on an abandoned hunting lodge for a mass orgy, hoping to reclaim a sense of control. Brent returns to the school to meet Sisler but finds the principal dead with the words “virgin not” carved into his forehead. Before Brent can respond, he’s knocked unconscious. Meanwhile, Jody, by chance, drives past Mr. Marliston’s house and notices him moving a heavy trunk inside. She helps him bring it into the house, and he casually hints that her father might be inside that trunk. She discovers Brent, battered and bloodied, inside the trunk, and is knocked unconscious again.
Inside the lodge, Marliston, in a deliberate persona as Lora Lee Sherman, reveals his plan: he is Lora Lee Sherman’s illegitimate son and wants to reveal the sins of the town’s adults to justify his own vengeance. He asks Brent to recount the night 25 years ago in detail, and Brent discloses that the four boys—including himself—did indeed rape Lora Lee. Marliston explains that his mother’s tragedy and anger fueled his own murderous spree, suggesting that one of the public figures may have fathered him, and that his killings target virgins to strip wealthy families of their “precious virginal children.”
Kenny intrudes into Marliston’s house and frees Jody as Brent confronts the killer. Marliston kills Brent in a brutal struggle, and Jody and Kenny flee toward the lodge’s orgy. Marliston pursues them, slaying a deputy along the way, and bursts inside wielding an axe as panic erupts among the students. In the chaos, Kenny is wounded, and Marliston closes in on Jody and Kenny. Jody manages to push Marliston off a balcony; he falls and is impaled on fence posts, briefly reviving before Deputy Mina, Amanda Anka, shoots him dead with two pistols.
The day after, Jody keeps the unsettling truth from the police as she and her mother drive away from town. A figure resembling Lora Lee Sherman disappears behind a moving school bus, leaving a haunting reminder of the past. The film closes with the waterfalls outside Cherry Falls, the scene turning a vivid, unsettling red as the sun sinks on a town that has faced its darkest secrets. > "see other people."
