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(Popcorn Frights Review)Dressed to Dismember: Fashion, Feminity, and the Ghosts of THE MANNEQUIN

By. Professor Horror

                                             

At first glance, John Berardo’s THE MANNEQUIN. (which played at Popcorn Frights Film Festival) looks like a slick little possession chiller about a haunted fashion building and a mutilation-happy ghost. But sit with it a bit, and you realize the real horror isn’t just the supernatural. It’s how women’s bodies have always been carved up, displayed, and discarded in the name of “art.” Mannequins, after all, are body doubles without agency, frozen in poses meant to sell a dress or a dream. The film leans into that uncanny vibe, turning fashion’s favorite prop into a metaphor for the way industries consume women limb by limb. That the killer here once posed as a headshot photographer isn’t a throwaway plot detail, but a chilling nod to the predatory gaze that has long hidden behind the camera lens, with violence excused as creativity.

                                   

The film opens with a bang: a stylish black-and-white prologue that feels like The Twilight Zone dipped in Sin City’s paintbox, cigarette smoke curling through the frame as a predatory photographer sizes up his prey. Blood runs crimson while everything else is drained of color, and the period-accurate sexism is laid on thick. It’s a bold, confident opening that promises a horror film equally obsessed with style and substance. The promise is only partly fulfilled, but what lingers in THE MANNEQUIN isn’t its pacing issues or the slightly goofy ghost-hunter detour, it’s the way the film drapes horror over fashion’s bones, exposing the haunted architecture of downtown Los Angeles and the gendered violence stitched into its history. The surface plot is familiar: Liana Rojas (Isabella Gomez), a blocked assistant stylist, moves into the building where her sister mysteriously died a year prior. It turns out the site was once the hunting ground of a mutilation-obsessed killer posing as a headshot photographer, and now his ghost won’t rest until more bodies have been dismembered. Cue possessions, creepy mannequins, and enough unexplained happenings to make you wish you hadn’t signed that lease. But while the beats sound like any number of possession chillers, what makes THE MANNEQUIN resonate is how it frames the female body as both display and battlefield.

                           

Fashion is the perfect horror setting because a mannequin is already uncanny: a body without a soul, frozen in a pose that suggests life but never quite captures it. Berardo leans into this symbolism, surrounding his characters with a plastic double that silently reflects their own vulnerability. The killer’s obsession with severed limbs feels like the nastiest exaggeration of an industry that already dismembers women metaphorically, cropping them into consumable parts (ex: a leg in an ad, a waist in a runway shot, a cheekbone perfected under the right lighting). When Liana peers at the mannequin lurking in the corner of her building, the terror comes not just from its eerie stillness but from how it echoes the commodification of her own body and career.

That sense of objectification seeps outward into the very walls themselves, as if the building were another mannequin on a larger scale as it is dressed up, posed, but still concealing something hollow and unsettling beneath the surface. Therefore, the building itself becomes a character. Industrial-chic with vintage flourishes, it’s the kind of loft space you’d expect in an HGTV renovation show, but Berardo and production designer Emily Peters make sure every brick, hallway, and exposed pipe feels saturated with memory. Los Angeles is a city built on reinvention, on tearing down and rebranding, but this film insists the past doesn’t vanish so easily. The walls remember. The mannequin remembers. The ghosts certainly remember. Its haunted urban memory made literal, a reminder that gentrification can dress up a space, but it can’t wash away what happened there. The mannequin skulking in the shadows is less a prop than a witness, a reminder of the women chewed up by both a killer and an industry built on turning bodies into product.

                        

What makes this more than an academic exercise in symbolism is Isabella Gomez’s presence as Liana. Horror has a long, frustrating history of sidelining Latina characters as it relegates them to expendable side roles or background stereotypes. By centering a Latina protagonist, THE MANNEQUIN feels fresher, grounded in a perspective the genre too often ignores. Gomez brings a mix of fragility and determination to Liana, making her survival less about exorcism in the traditional sense and more about reclamation. Her battle against possession plays as a metaphor for refusing to let her body, creativity, or grief be consumed by forces outside her control. In a film where mannequins represent silenced and fragmented women, Liana refuses to become another prop. 

That refusal lands with extra weight when you consider the film’s villain. The predatory photographer, introduced in the prologue, is not just another slasher-style ghost. He embodies the long lineage of men who’ve cloaked their violence in the language of art. Headshots, fashion spreads, runway shoots, these are all spaces where power dynamics tilt heavily, and where women have been told to endure invasive gazes and predatory advances as the price of creative opportunity. Berardo makes that exploitation literal, tying artistic gaze directly to physical mutilation. The result is horror that understands how thin the line has always been between “inspiration” and violation.

                                      

Of course, the film doesn’t always keep its needle on this sharp critique. The middle act drags, with time jumps that feel clunky and scares that repeat themselves to diminishing effect. By the time a ghost hunter shows up, the tonal wobble tips into cheesy territory. But even then, the craftsmanship keeps you watching. Jonathan Pope’s cinematography, already award-winning, gives the film a sleek gloss that makes every shadow look dangerous. Peters’ production design turns mannequins into an omnipresent threat, and Alexander Arntzen’s score layers on just enough unease to keep you from feeling comfortable. If the scares lose their bite, the atmosphere never does.

What sticks after the credits isn’t the ghost hunter subplot or even the possession mechanics. It’s the way the film insists on connecting horror to the everyday violences women face in fashion, in art, in urban spaces that rebrand without reconciling. THE MANNEQUIN is horror stitched out of exploitation: mannequins as fragmented women, buildings as tombs, photographers as predators. In putting a Latina protagonist at the center of this haunted ecosystem, Berardo at least gestures toward reclaiming the narrative from within. It’s messy, uneven, and sometimes repetitive, but it’s also stylish, pointed, and haunted by truths the fashion world would rather leave in storage. At Popcorn Frights, where audiences come expecting stylish scares and bloody fun, THE MANNEQUIN delivers both, but its real thread comes from what’s lurking under the fabric of fashion itself to reveal the violence stitched into its seams. This isn’t just a ghost story. but it’s a reminder that industries built on bodies will always have blood on their hands, and sometimes, those bodies come back to collect.