The Initiation is a 1984 American slasher film directed by Larry Stewart, and starring Daphne Zuniga, Vera Miles, Clu Gulager, and James Read.

The plot focuses on a young woman plagued by a disturbing recurring nightmare, who finds herself and her fellow sorority pledges stalked by a killer during their initiation ritual in a department store after-hours.

The Initiation was given a regional staggered release by New World Pictures beginning in the spring of 1984, and continued to screen theatrically through December of that year.

In the years since its release, the film has been noted for marking star Zuniga's first leading role after her minor part in The Dorm That Dripped Blood (1982),[5] as well as establishing a contemporary cult following as a midnight movie.

Hoping to unravel the nightmare's meaning, Kelly pitches a term project idea to Peter, the graduate assistant in her psychology seminar, about it.

Kelly prepares to partake in her sorority's initiation ritual which entails her and a group of other pledges breaking into her father's multilevel department store after hours and stealing the night porter's uniform.

On the night of the initiation, Dwight departs for a business trip, but is brutally stabbed outside his car with a hand rake before being decapitated.

Meanwhile, head sorority sister Megan lets coeds Chad, Ralph, and Andy break into the store to scare the pledges.

At the university, Peter and his colleague, Heidi, comes across newspaper clippings detailing the fire Kelly described in her dream; the articles reveal the burning man's identity as Jason Randall, a floor manager at the Fairchild department store who was at one time married to Frances.

[1] While writing the screenplay, Pratt deliberately incorporated "soap opera" elements in the subplots involving the Fairchild family's history, as he was inspired by the genre at the time.

"[5] The majority of the supporting cast were local actors from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, including Hunter Tylo and Joy Jones, both of whom were students at Brookhaven College.

[6] Vera Miles, best known for her portrayal of Lila Crane in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), was cast as the mother of Zuniga's character.

[7] According to writer Charles Pratt Jr., Crane was employing more experimental camera techniques, close-ups, and point-of-view shots, whereas Stewart, primarily a television director, used a more conventional style akin to that medium.

The campus scenes were filmed at Southern Methodist University, while the dream-lab sequences were shot in an abandoned Holiday Inn hotel, where the production design had refitted a maid's closet to appear as the laboratory.

"[13] The Baltimore Evening Sun's Lou Cedrone wrote that the film was "not so gory as most of the slice-and-dice genre," comparing it to Friday the 13th (1980) and Sleepaway Camp (1983), but added: "The Initiation may be a little better than similar features, if only because it is a little less bloody.

"[30] In a subsequent review, Cedrone characterized the film as a "Friday the 13th clone," and added: "Vera Miles and Clu Gulager are performers caught in this hapless mess.

"[31] Candice Russell of the South Florida Sun Sentinel awarded the film one-and-a-half out of four stars, referring to it as "an uncomfortable pastiche of scenes we've seen before," and likened elements of it to Brian De Palma's Sisters (1973).

[32] Sharon Johnson of The Patriot-News praised the film for offering "a reasonable amount of suspense, a surprise ending that doesn't cheat and a complex plot that will never bore you," concluding that, "the movie as a whole holds together rather well.

"[24] Dread Central's Anthony Arrigo observed in a 2016 review "a surprising amount of character depth on display here, more so than similar pictures of the era.