Filmed in Los Angeles, Graduation Day was released in the spring of 1981, grossing nearly $24 million on a budget of $250,000, far exceeding the genre's usual box office at the time.

Laura Ramstead, a senior athlete at a small-town Southern California high school, collapses during a track meet, dying unexpectedly of a cardiac embolism.

Principal Guglione fields phone calls from the worried parents of Paula, Sally, Tony, and Dolores, all of whom have gone missing.

Coach Michaels discovers Ralph's body before he is met by a knife-wielding Kevin, who reveals himself to be the killer—it is he who has been systematically dispatching the track team, to which he has affixed blame for Laura's death.

Kevin pursues her, chasing her beneath the bleachers, where she finds Dolores's severed head and Pete's spike-riddled body in a storage shed.

After giving her statement to the police, a traumatized Anne returns home that night and hallucinates an undead Kevin in her room, when in reality it is just her drunk stepfather Ronald.

The next morning, Anne impassively says goodbye and leaves the town in a taxi while the Graduation Day banner hangs over the main street.

[1] Its release was expanded to fifteen additional cities in the United States, beginning on May 22 until August 14,[1] and finished with $23.9 million during its theatrical course.

Writing for The Washington Post, Richard Harrington criticized the film as "badly acted" and "seemingly shot with varied-quality stock footage".

[4] Linda Gross of the Los Angeles Times referred to it as "an insinuating and lecherous movie with many hokey effects and poor-quality acting",[5] while Variety similarly noted the film as "poor quality".

[6] The Fort Lauderdale News's Candice Russell summarized it as a "drippy, dippy horror film", noting: "Because Graduation Day doesn't deserve to be taken seriously, it's fun to laugh at its incongruities".

[7] Jeremy Wheeler at AllMovie awarded the film one out of five stars, writing that "Graduation Day needed more time in the school of horror before it could truly make the grade.