The Femme's Still Fatale, but She's Plastic, Too

Mannequins. It's their eyes that get to you first, and then linger, following you, impossibly. To look on those unblinking sockets is to gaze into Nietzsche's abyss, which rewards your own scrutiny with the blank, sightless stare of the unalive, a permanently unnerving reminder that we are all, in our own uniquely fleshy ways, simulacra of someone, or something, other.

Connoisseurs of the cinematic subgenre that includes the disquieting likes of University of Texas alum David Schmoeller's Tourist Trap, Sandor Stern's Pin, Richard Attenborough's wickedly twisted Magic, and Japan's just plain freaky The Fuccons know that there are few things creepier than a mannequin on the move. But has anyone ever considered these bewigged and enigmatic doppelgängers as anything other than semistatic symbols of their living, breathing (for the most part) co-stars' paranoid displacement neuroses?

True, mannequins have traditionally been perceived as woefully limited in their ability to emote effectively onscreen, but that's never been much of an impediment to the careers of Steven Seagal or Sir Roger Moore. Free from the time- and budget-consuming constrictions of their SAG counterparts and considerably more empathetic than their CGI brethren, the humble, haunting mannequin has been relegated to the occasional cinematic stand-on and a permanent day job as fashion avatars. And yet they can do so much more.

Enter Austin filmmaker Daniel Erickson and his associate producer David Lane Smith, who've finally given these stoic scary movie stalwarts their due in Eve's Necklace, a feature-length thriller with the first all-mannequin cast and a score to die for. (More on that later.)

Erickson and Smith previously collaborated on the award-winning short "Mr. Pumpkin" and 1989's non-Wayans-related indie Scary Movie, but Eve's Necklace – with fellow ATX actors John Hawkes (Lost, Deadwood) and Cyndi Williams (Room) voicing their mute onscreen counterparts – is something altogether different. For starters, Erickson's script wasn't originally developed as a vehicle for the lifeless. A suburban film noir right down to its smartly utilized and effectively atmospheric black-and-white cinematography (it turns out chiaroscuro is a mannequin's best friend), Eve's Necklace is Out of the Past by way of Rod Serling's "The After Hours."

It's also a darkly comic marital melodrama that proves once and for all that if there's anything more unsettling than watching an animatedly inanimate husband and wife getting it on, it's watching a man-made mad-dog killer performing brain salad surgery – via the rear wheels of a Ford Mustang, no less – on another mannequin's hapless (and crunchy!) cranium.

"Eve's Necklace was one of a handful of scripts I had written and then put on the shelf," explains Erickson, who in the intervening years has kept his foot in the filmmaking door with music videos and other small projects while day-jobbing for Odwalla.

"I started to get the itch to make a feature film again, and so I was looking for the most economic way of doing that. I'm old school in the sense that I'm used to shooting on film and editing on a Steenbeck the old-fashioned way. It was my friend [and Austin filmmaker] Kirk Hunter who finally convinced me that I could make digital video look like film. We ended up using a Canon XL2."

So how did the whole mannequin thing come about? And while we're at it, how exactly do you go about casting mannequins? Open call on Erickson's film had to be one of the most subdued casting calls in film history.

"That was an afterthought," Erickson readily admits, adding that the idea came to him after hearing a piece on talk radio about protesters complaining that the mannequins at Victoria's Secret were too sexy. "That made me laugh and so as a joke I bounced the idea of using mannequins off David who, of course, said, 'Not a bad idea!'

"As for the casting, it was basically all done on eBay. There's thousands of mannequins from all over the world, and, if I remember correctly, our main character, Eva, who is Hispanic and ended up being voiced by my ex-wife, Veronica, came from Thailand. Obviously we wanted each mannequin to have its own personality, so one problem we encountered was the realization that almost all mannequins are manufactured with a permanent smile on their face. And we really wanted a neutral expression so as not to betray what was going on inside the character's minds."

What may yet be even more remarkable than the notion of an all-mannequin thriller with one foot planted very firmly in real-world familial meltdowns is the film's masterfully evocative and (literally) classic orchestral score, which, with its ominous bursts of brass and brooding strings recalls nothing so much as one of Hitchcock's Vertigo-era scores. There's a compelling – amazing, actually – reason for the Hitchcockian overtones, but because the production has not yet finalized the rights to the score, we'll leave the composer's identity a secret for now. (This is a mystery, after all.)

Ultimately, Erickson's foray into his characters' messy and unstill lives is an experiment for both filmmaker and audience.

"Half the experiment was making it," the director admits. "The other half is how people choose to respond to it."

So how have audiences reacted?

"The common reaction so far is that people are kind of creeped out by the whole thing. Maybe it's too close for comfort, these mannequins going through the motions of real people. There was always this underlying metaphorical meaning to me that the mannequins kind of represented the superficial, plastic emptiness of the suburban American lifestyle. A recurring theme was increasing stress over credit-card debt, even though the married couple depicted in the story insists on building their white picket fence that they can't afford. But putting metaphorical meaning aside, my main objective was to make an effective thriller."

Eve's Necklace: All that and a happy ending to boot. Or is it? Hitchcock – no slouch at playing the cheeky agent provocateur to his audiences and relentlessly experimenting with the boundaries of filmmaking and fear – would be pleased.

---

Eve's Necklace screens March 6, 9pm, at the Alamo Drafthouse Village. For more information, visit www.themannequinmovie.com.