The outcast cinema student, Stephen Grace, does not drive cars due to the trauma of losing his brother in a car accident. He befriends, Quaid, who since the age of 6 has experienced dreadful nightmares and daydreams about the death of his parents. Quaid proposes they research about each one's innermost fear. Stephen sees the chance of developing an original thesis for college and invites his friend, Cheryl, to work with them. Among the interviewees, Stephen talks to his colleague, Abby who works with him in the library. Abby has a complex about the way she looks. When the work is almost complete, Quaid has an outburst at one interviewee's and ends up destroying the camera and editing equipment. Stephen begins to re-evaluate the situation.

Barkley Michaelson is in a deep life rut. He's struggling to finish his PhD thesis when his father, the learned Eli Michaelson, wins the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Barkley and his mother, Sarah, a renowned forensic psychiatrist, now have the ill-fortune of living with a man-eating monster whose philandering ways have gotten less and less discrete. As if Barkley's world is not bad enough, on the eve of his father receiving the Nobel, Barkley is kidnapped and the requested ransom is the $2,000,000 in Nobel prize money. Needless to say, Eli refuses to pay it and so starts a venomous tale of familial dysfunction, lust, betrayal and ultimately revenge. In the words of Michel De Montaigne, the 16th century philosopher: "There is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead."

A senior at an elite college, already under severe pressure to complete her thesis and land a prestigious job...