Alien creatures emerge from the sun and attack Earth.

Summer in a small southern town: Grace wants to go to college, but her feckless mom has poisoned that well (no student loans because mom has welshed on credit cards in Grace's name). Dorian wants to escape from his snobbish adoptive parents. They team up to sell marijuana - she hopes for enough to go to college. Both investigate family secretes, and things get complicated when Dorian falls for her, Grace falls for someone else, and Grace's 15-year-old sister behaves badly. Can Dorian find independence and Grace get to college. And what constitutes a family, anyway?

While filming a horror movie of mummy in a forest, the students and their professor of the University of Pittsburgh hear on the TV the news that the dead are awaking and walking. Ridley and Francine decide to leave the group, while Jason heads to the dormitory of his girlfriend Debra Monahan. She does not succeed in contacting her family and they travel in Mary's van to the house of Debra's parents in Scranton, Pennsylvania. While driving her van, Mary sees a car accident and runs over a highway patrolman and three other zombies trying to escape from them. Later the religious Mary is depressed, questioning whether the victims where really dead, and tries to commit suicide, shooting herself with a pistol. Her friends take her to a hospital where they realize that the dead are indeed awaking and walking and they need to fight to survive while traveling to Debra's parents house.