Urban Legend (film) - Plot

Plot

The film opens with Michelle Mancini (Natasha Gregson Wagner) driving at night during a storm. She realises that her fuel is low and pulls by a gas station. She is startled by the gas attendant who begins to refill her tank. Michelle hands her card to the attendant, however he returns and convinces Michelle that her credit card is not working and wants her to come into his office to speak to the credit card company on the phone. However, when Michelle gets inside the station and picks up the phone, there is no one on the other line. Convinced the attendant means her harm, Michelle sprays mace in his face and, as the door is locked, she smashes the window with the telephone and speeds away. The attendant shouts after her "Someone's in the back seat!" On the road, Michelle relaxes a little bit until someone sits up in the back seat and swings an axe at her.

Inside a coffee shop lounge at Pendleton University, college student Parker Riley (Michael Rosenbaum) is telling an urban legend called the 'Stanley Hall Massacre' about 25 years ago when a crazy professor killed a dozen students at a closed down dorm on campus. Two of the students, Natalie Simon (Alicia Witt) and Brenda (Rebecca Gayheart), listen with skepticism while they listen to Parker's girlfriend, Sasha Thomas (Tara Reid), who operates a local radio call-in show, finish her broadcast. Paul Gardener (Jared Leto), a pompous college reporter, joins the group and sneers at Parker's yarn. Brenda is obviously attracted to Paul. Natalie and Brenda walk towards the closed down Stanley Hall dorm building, where they suggest they chant Bloody Mary as a gag, when they are surprised by Damon Brooks (Joshua Jackson), a misfit student who taunts them over going inside the boarded up building. Natalie and Brenda split up where Natalie goes home to her dorm room where she interrupts her Goth roommate, Tosh Guaneri (Danielle Harris), having sex with a guy.

During a class, Professor William Wexler (Robert Englund) is discussing folklore and urban legends. Wexler sees Brenda and Natalie laughing and confronts Brenda, telling if she doesn't believe in urban legends then she should come up to the front of the class and drink soda and pop rocks candy. She walks to the front but is hesitant on mixing the soda and the pop rocks. Damon walks up to the front of the class and tries drinking soda and pop rocks candy to prove the urban legend that his stomach will not explode. He then fakes going into a seizure and playing dead, much to the annoyance of Wexler and the amusement of his friends. Later that day, Natalie and Brenda see Paul distributing newspapers detailing the decapitation murder the previous night. The stuffy Dean Adams (John Neville) and the campus security guard, Reese Wilson (Loretta Devine), seize copies of the school paper about the recent murder. Paul protests to the dean about a possible murder on the campus. But Adams tells Paul that there is no killer and the only crazy person is him.

Natalie is shaken by Michelle's death, Damon Brooks (Joshua Jackson) offers to talk and the two drive into the woods for privacy. Natalie soon realises that the only reason Damon brought her out into the woods was to have sex with her, and she rejects him. Before they leave Damon leaves the vehicle to urinate. Damon is attacked by the killer when he enters the woods, who hangs him from a tree with the rope attached to the car. When Natalie exits the car to search for Damon the killer approaches her, leading to her getting back in the car and driving away, strangling Damon in the process. Natalie goes to the campus security office and tells Reese about the killing, but when both arrive at the scene, the body and Damon's car are gone.

The next day, after failing to locate Damon, Natalie's friends are skeptical of her claims of a murder and think that Damon's disappearance is one of his practical jokes. Natalie goes to the library to research urban legends by reading a book titled 'The Encyclopedia of Urban Legends' and sees that Damon took it out last. While she is away, her roommate Tosh Guaneri is chatting to an anonymous guy online, organising a place to meet up for sex. She leaves the room to prepare but unknowingly leaves the door open. When she returns she finds that her anonymous guy has written that he is in her room. The killer attacks Tosh and begins to strangle her in the dark. Natalie walks in but thinks she is having sex again as she dismisses turning on the light and goes to bed with her head phones as Tosh dies. The next morning, Natalie wakes up and sees her roommate dead from slashed wrists and a message left by the killer written on a wall in blood saying: "Aren't you glad you didn't turn on the lights?"

Everyone thinks that Tosh committed suicide and the message on the wall was "a very morbid suicide note". Natalie convinces Paul that Tosh's death was not a suicide and they look for evidence about the Stanley Hall Massacre, but they find no evidence and all the old newspaper clippings in the library from 1972 when the killings took place are gone. Natalie and Paul run into the creepy-looking janitor. They ask him questions about the Stanley Hall Massacre and the janitor tells them to 'talk to Wexler'. Natalie and Paul sneak into Wexler's office for evidence and are caught by the professor. Brought before Dean Adams, Paul asks about the Stanley Hall Massacre, but the dean avoids the question by telling Paul that he's fired from the school newspaper and tells both of them to stop investigating something that never happened. Adams further tells Natalie that she has a criminal record for "reckless endangerment" and served a year of probation, and that she too is to stop investigating the urban legend about the Stanley Hall Massacre if she wants to stay at the college. Outside, Paul becomes angry when Natalie continues to avoid his questions about her past or if she knew Michelle.

Later, Natalie walks into the campus swimming pool where Brenda is doing laps when she thinks she sees the killer approach, but the figure in the winter coat is only a fellow student. In the locker room, Natalie confides in Brenda that she did know Michelle. She tells the story of how she and Michelle were out driving one night on a dark road without their car's headlights on when a passing car flashed them and, with Michelle driving, the chased down the car in which the car went off the road and the driver was killed.

That evening, Dean Adams is in the parking garage to drive home when the killer ambushes him and kills him by slashing his ankles and driving over him with his own car. At a fraternity party Parker is throwing, Paul arrives with an old newspaper article given to him by the janitor, which tells that Wexler was the sole survivor of the 1972 Stanley Hall Massacre and that he may be responsible for the killings. When Natalie admits to having feelings for Paul, they kiss. Brenda sees this and in a jealous rage, leaves the party.

A little later, during the party, Parker gets a phone call and is told about what happened to his pet dog (it was cooked in a kitchen microwave oven as another urban legend). He runs into a nearby bathroom to throw up when the killer attacks him and kills him by pouring pop rocks and liquid drain drown his throat.

While Natalie is trying to reach Paul who ran off, Sasha is attacked at the radio station by the killer, who chases her through the building with an axe. Natalie hears Sasha screaming over the radio and runs over to the station but is too late, as the killer catches up to Sasha and axes her to death. Meanwhile, Reese searches Wexler's office but finds the floor covered with blood. She calls the police, but because of a serious thunderstorm, the roads are washed out. Reese goes off to find the killer on her own.

Natalie runs into Paul outside her doom room and becomes suspicious of where he went during the time Sasha was killed. They both find Brenda, and they become suspicious about her. They drive away from the campus to look for help and stop at another gas station. While Paul goes to a phone to call the police, Brenda and Natalie notice a strange odor and upon opening the car trunk, discover the dead and mangled body of Professor Wexler. They both run away and into the nearby woods where they split up. On a back road, Natalie is picked up by the eerie janitor (Julian Richings). But the killer chases them in another car and the janitor's truck runs off the road and the janitor hits his head and is killed.

Natalie returns to the campus and tries calling for help on a police phone, but she hears screams from inside the abandoned Stanley Hall building, where there is a light on the third floor. Natalie breaks in to look around and finds the dead bodies of Parker, Adams, and Damon. She finds Brenda lying motionless on a bed in a room lit with hundreds of different candles. But before she can react, Natalie is knocked out. Waking up later, Natalie finds herself tied to the bed with the killer standing over her—the hood comes off to reveal..... Brenda. No longer acting like the casually nice and friendly girl as seen thorough the movie, the sneering and wild-eyed Brenda explains to Natalie that the boy who was killed in the accident by Michelle and Natalie years before was Brenda's boyfriend. Brenda befriended Natalie this whole time to torment her with urban legends as her insane way of getting even. Just as Brenda is about to kill Natalie by removing her kidneys as in the "kidney heist" urban legend, Reese appears to come to Natalie's rescue, but Brenda attacks Reese with a knife and wrestles her gun away. Just then, Paul appears, applauding Brenda for her revenge plan and saying he will to help cover up Brenda's guilt in return for the opportunity to help his career by writing a false story of how Wexler committed the murders. But Brenda is not fooled and before she can shoot either one of them, Reese revives and shoots Brenda, leaving Natalie to finish off her best friend as Brenda kept saying in a sad voice,"What kind of friend are you". After Brenda kept tempting Natalie to shoot her, Natalie decided to do so. Paul, who takes the gun away and also the 2 of them ran close to Reese and also she told them that she couldn't wait to be a cop before a bullet could hit her. Then Paul told Reese to stay here while they go and get help.

However, as Paul and Natalie are driving away to find help and safety, Brenda sits up in the back seat of their car and attacks them in the same manner she killed Michelle in the opening scene. Paul smashes the car into a guardrail and Brenda smashes through the windshield and off a bridge into a river far below.

Some time later at another college campus, a group of college students are discussing the recent Pendleton Massacre and urban legends when one student, who is the alive and well Brenda with a different haircut, offers to tell them the real story about it all.