Rush Week 1989

Toni Daniels is an ambitious journalism major at Tambler College, assigned to do a cover story on the campus’s rush week. She dives into a series of interviews with members of the fraternities and also sits down with Dean Grail to gauge the atmosphere on campus. As she digs deeper, the mood grows uneasy: a silhouette of danger lingers over the traditions of the week. Meanwhile, Julie Ann McGuffin disappears after taking part in a clandestine nude modeling session held in the university’s science building, and Toni swiftly begins to pursue the truth behind the disappearance, following a trail that grows colder with every lead.

The tension escalates when Alma Gifford, a student who works as an escort, flees from the Beta Delta Beta fraternity after a prank, and is pursued by a cloaked killer wielding an axe. The sequence of events grows chilling as the killer corners Alma in the woods and executes her with brutal efficiency: the attack leaves Toni and the campus reeling, intensifying the sense that someone is targeting women who have posed nude. The investigation tightens as Toni questions Sarah, Julie’s roommate, who reveals that Julie used to model for a man who paid her well and that Julie had met this man through Alma, who has also vanished. The connection between modeling, money, and danger becomes clearer, pushing Toni to press Jeff Jacobs, the head of Beta Delta Beta, about Alma’s disappearance. Jeff, in turn, begins to draw Toni into his orbit, inviting her to a picnic and blurring the lines between professional distance and personal attraction.

Byron, Jeff’s friend, warns Toni that Jeff has not been the same since his former girlfriend—the Dean’s daughter—was murdered and dismembered in the campus science building the previous year. The sense of a lingering, unspoken history fuels Toni’s unease and deepens the mystery surrounding the killer. A crucial break arrives when Arnold Krangen(/actor/john-donovan) offers Toni money to pose for him, showing her a hundred-dollar bill stamped with a double-sided axe emblem—the same emblem she noticed on the bills left by Julie in her dorm. Toni follows the clue to Arnold’s house, where she discovers a cache of pornographic photos of female students, a chilling collection that links Arnold to the campus’s hidden perversions. She confronts Dean Grail with what she has found, but the Dean dismisses Arnold as a sexual deviant without admitting there is a killer in their midst.

As rush week reaches its culmination with a grand campus bash, Toni learns that another student, Rebecca Winters, has vanished after meeting a man in the science building. She phones the Beta Delta Beta fraternity and asks Byron to relay a message that Jeff should meet her in the science building; she also calls Arnold and pretends to agree to pose for him, luring him to the same location. Arnold agrees to meet, and Toni waits inside the science building, determined to uncover the truth. When Arnold arrives, he is slain by the cloaked killer with an axe, a moment that confirms the threat is real and immediate. Toni is then confronted by Jeff, dressed in a cloak and mask, whom she initially thinks is the killer. Yet another masked figure, identical to Jeff, appears—revealing that the mastermind is actually Dean Grail. He declares his motive: to “purify” the campus of its perceived sins by eliminating women who had posed nude for Arnold, including his own daughter as the first victim. A dramatic confrontation ensues between Dean Grail and Jeff, culminating in Jeff decapitating the killer and bringing an unsettling chapter of campus history to a tense close.