Plot
In 1962, college freshmen Lawrence "Larry" Kroger (Tom Hulce) and Kent Dorfman (Stephen Furst) seek to join a fraternity at Faber College. They visit the prestigious Omega Theta Pi House's invitational party but are not welcomed there. They then try next door at Delta Tau Chi House, where Kent's brother was once a member, making Kent a "legacy." There they find John "Bluto" Blutarsky (John Belushi) urinating outside the fraternity house. The Deltas "need the dues" so they permit Larry and Kent to pledge. They receive the fraternity names "Pinto" (Larry) and "Flounder" (Kent).
Vernon Wormer (John Vernon), dean of Faber College, wants to remove the Delta fraternity from campus due to repeated conduct violations and low academic standing. Since they are already on probation, he puts the Deltas on something he calls "double secret probation" and orders the clean-cut, smug Omega president Greg Marmalard (James Daughton) to find a way to get rid of the Deltas permanently.
Flounder is bullied by Omega member and ROTC cadet commander Doug Neidermeyer (Mark Metcalf), so Bluto and Daniel Simpson "D-Day" Day (Bruce McGill) persuade Flounder to sneak Neidermeyer's horse into Dean Wormer's office late at night. They give him a gun and tell him to shoot it. Unbeknownst to Flounder, the gun is loaded with blanks. Unable to bring himself to kill the horse, he fires into the ceiling. The noise frightens the horse so much that it dies of a heart attack.
In the cafeteria the next day, smooth-talking Eric "Otter" Stratton (Tim Matheson) tries to convince the stuck-up Mandy Pepperidge (Mary Louise Weller) to abandon her boyfriend, the uninterested Marmalard, and date him instead. Bluto proceeds to provoke Marmalard with his impression of a popping zit by stuffing his mouth with mashed potatoes and propelling it at Marmalard and table mates, Chip Diller (Kevin Bacon) and Barbara "Babs" Jansen (Martha Smith). Bluto then starts a food fight that engulfs the cafeteria.
Bluto and D-Day steal the answers to an upcoming psychology test, but it turns out the Omegas planted the exam stencil and the Deltas get every answer wrong. Their grade-point averages drop so low that Wormer only needs one more incident to revoke the charter that allows them to remain on campus.
To cheer themselves up, the Deltas organize a toga party, during which Otis Day and the Knights perform "Shout". The dean's alcoholic, lecherous wife, Marion (Verna Bloom), attends the party at Otter's invitation and has sex with him. Pinto hooks up with Clorette (Sarah Holcomb), a girl he met at the supermarket, and makes out with her only to learn she is the mayor's 13-year-old daughter. He later brings her home in a shopping cart. Due to the party, Wormer organizes a kangaroo court with the Omegas and revokes Delta's charter and all belongings are confiscated.
To take their minds off their troubles, Otter, Donald "Boon" Schoenstein (Peter Riegert), Flounder and Pinto go on a road trip. Otter picks up some girls from Emily Dickinson College by pretending to be the fiancé of Fawn Liebowitz, a girl who recently died on campus. They stop at a roadhouse because Otis Day and the Knights are performing there, not realizing that it caters to an exclusively black clientele. The hulking patrons intimidate the guys and they flee, damaging Flounder's borrowed car and leaving their frightened dates behind.
Boon breaks up with his girlfriend Katy (Karen Allen) after discovering her sexual relationship with a professor (Donald Sutherland). Marmalard is told that his girlfriend is having an affair with Otter, so he and other Omegas lure him to a motel and beat him up. The Deltas' midterm grades are so poor that an ecstatic Wormer expels them all. He even notifies their draft boards of their eligibility. In the process, before Bluto attempts to speak to the dean, Wormer orders Flounder to speak with the words, "Well? Out with it!", whereupon Flounder vomits on the dean.
It seems time for the Deltas to give up but Bluto, supported by the injured Otter, rouses them with an impassioned, historically inaccurate speech ("Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?!") and they decide to take revenge on Wormer and the Omegas. The Deltas construct a rogue parade float with Flounder's car as its base and wreak havoc on the annual homecoming parade. During the ensuing chaos, the futures of many of the main characters are revealed. The last shot of the film is of Bluto driving away in a white convertible with his soon-to-be wife: Mandy Pepperidge.
Read more about this topic: National Lampoon's Animal House
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“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)