Kelly Fairchild is a college student who has carried a troubling, recurring nightmare since childhood—a dream in which a mysterious man is burned alive inside her family home. The nightmare began after a head injury left her with amnesia when she was nine. In an effort to understand the dream, she pitches a term-project idea to Peter, a graduate assistant in her psychology seminar, hoping to uncover its hidden meaning. [Peter] agrees to run a sleep study on Kelly, but her mother, Frances, quickly forbids it. Simultaneously, miles away at a psychiatric hospital, several patients escape and a nurse is murdered. [Frances] is alerted to the incident by phone and relays the news to Kelly’s father, Dwight.
As Kelly gears up for her sorority’s initiation ritual, she learns the stair-step path of hazing involves her and a small group of pledges breaking into her father’s vast department store after hours and stealing a night porter’s uniform. The four main pledges are [Kelly Fairchild], her friend Marcia, and roommates Alison and Beth. On the night of the initiation, [Dwight] departs on a business trip but is brutally stabbed outside his car with a hand rake and then decapitated, his killer taking his car and his body in the trunk with him. Before they arrive at the store, the night porter is murdered during rounds, hinting that danger lurks in the hollowed-out corridors of the familiar place.
Beth decides to quit, leaving Kelly, Marcia, and Alison to soldier on. The trio splits up, with Kelly heading upstairs to retrieve one of the spare uniforms from the lounge. In a parallel movement, head sorority sister Megan permits coeds Chad, Ralph, and Andy to break into the store to spook the pledges. The plan spirals into chaos as Andy is killed with a hatchet and Megan is shot with a bow and arrow. Ralph and Chad manage to terrify Kelly and Marcia by hiding in a dressing room, and the three friends regroup with Alison, only to discover they are locked inside the store.
Back at the university, [Peter] and his colleague, Heidi, dig into newspaper clippings about the fire Kelly described, discovering the identity of the burning man: Jason Randall, a floor manager at the Fairchild department store who was once married to Frances. Peter suspects that Jason may actually be Kelly’s biological father, and that her nightmare is a memory of him being set ablaze in a confrontation with Frances’ lover, Dwight, who later raised Kelly as his own daughter. A recent hospital revolt article confirms Jason had been a prisoner and a groundskeeper at the hospital, and he’d managed to escape during the breakout. Peter rushes to warn Frances at the Fairchild home.
Inside the store, Alison and Chad move about, and Alison makes a grim discovery: the night porter’s body in one area, followed by Chad’s corpse in a bathroom stall. Traumatized, Alison hides at a security desk on the ground floor as Kelly confronts a blood-streaked bathroom, where she sees Chad’s corpse and a message written in blood on a mirror. The fear escalates as Alison is attacked and stabbed at the desk.
The tension peaks when Ralph and Marcia’s encounter turns deadly: Ralph is killed by a harpoon, while Marcia flees through the store, pursued by the killer. She is eventually dragged into an elevator shaft as Kelly escapes and hides in the boiler room. From there, Kelly confronts Jason, whom she assumes is the killer, and the two duel in a rooftop pursuit where she clubs him with a pipe, sending him to the ground in defeat.
Peter and Frances arrive again at the store and find Jason clinging to life. Peter embraces what he believes is Kelly, only to have her stab him in the stomach moments later. Kelly, shaken by the scene, is confronted with a vision of her own reflection: a disturbing twin, Terry, who has lived in an institution since childhood after Frances left their father and married Dwight—a memory Kelly never fully embraced. As Terry lunges forward, Frances shoots her, and law enforcement soon arrives. Peter is loaded into an ambulance, while Kelly’s gaze remains fixed on her mother, mourning the revelations that have just reshaped her world.
