In a small Southern town, an eccentric old lady named Mrs. Pringle operates a wig shop with her morose, mentally impaired son, Rodney. An unsettling number of young college women begin to vanish, each before a visit to the wig shop. Unbeknownst to the townspeople, Mrs. Pringle has a dark secret; she's been murdering the students to harvest their scalp hair for her wigs. She uses an ingenious lure, advertising for a "hair model" as bait, and her son dutifully does her grim bidding. With each hair model that enters the shop's back room, the truth becomes more sinister, and the wigs grow more luxurious.

Meanwhile, Kathy, an inquisitive co-ed, becomes suspicious following the disappearance of her friend Dawn, one of the missing girls. She embarks on her own investigation which draws her dangerously close to Mrs. Pringle's shop. As Kathy digs deeper, she begins to piece together the connection between the missing girls and the oddly popular wig store. Her sleuthing pulls her into a perilous orbit around Mrs. Pringle and Rodney, and she soon realizes that the answer to the mystery may be more gruesome than she ever imagined. Her quest for the truth threatens to make her the next victim as she gets closer to uncovering the macabre source of the wigs.