Synopsis
When aspiring fashion designer Sofia Rojas dies alone in a historical downtown Los Angeles building, most people accept it as a tragic suicide. Her younger sister Liana, however, remains unconvinced. When she returns to the site with plans to rekindle her sister’s ambitions, Liana begins to have paranormal experiences that quickly escalate from unsettling to downright terrifying. She discovers that the building is haunted by a serial killer who brutally murdered and dismembered his victims there over half a century earlier. Now that he’s marked Liana and her friends as his next victims, they have to find a way to escape the ghost’s deadly grasp before they lose their own body parts.
Meet the Filmmaker
Meet the Filmmaker
John
Berardo
Writer, Director
Originally from Norman, Oklahoma, John always had the drive to expand his creative boundaries. Before starting his MFA at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, John received a BA from UCLA in Theater with a minor in Film, Television, and Digital Media....Read more
Originally from Norman, Oklahoma, John always had the drive to expand his creative boundaries. Before starting his MFA at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, John received a BA from UCLA in Theater with a minor in Film, Television, and Digital Media. In 2013 John wrote and directed a short horror film, DEMBANGER, for the USC Media Institute for Social Change. The short received positive reviews and inspired his first film INITIATION. In 2014 he directed iLA for Armani’s Films of City Frames, premiering at TIFF. The same year, John directed the public service announcement POST AND TEXT RESPONSIBLY for CBS2-KCAL9, receiving a Los Angeles Emmy nomination. In 2020, his feature debut, DEMBANGER, was selected to premiere at SXSW, Screamfest and Sitges, theatrically released domestically and worldwide in 2021 by XYZ Films, Saban Films and Lionsgate Entertainment under the new title, INITIATION. John's second feature, THE MANNEQUIN, went into production in 2023 under the SAG interim agreement and is set to be released by JackRabbit Media fall 2025.
John Berardo - Director’s Statement – The Mannequin
The Mannequin is a film born from loss, uncertainty, and the desperate need to create something out of chaos. In 2020, just days before the premiere of my feature debut at SXSW, everything changed. What was supposed to be "the year" turned into "that year," a time of waiting, grieving, and isolation. Like so many, I found myself stuck inside, my ambitions put on indefinite hold, staring through windows and screens at a world that felt frozen. To stay sane, I returned to creating with my hands: painting, drawing, building, small acts of survival through art. It was during this time that I rediscovered a collection of mannequins left behind by an old roommate, abandoned relics from another artist’s forgotten project. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away, there was something unsettling yet profoundly human about these empty, inanimate forms. Over months, I sculpted them into new pieces of living room art: limbs emerging from walls, light fixtures sprouting from torso stumps. As I worked, the seed of The Mannequin began to grow. This story is about chasing dreams from the past that feel just out of reach and the haunting devastation that comes with losing a loved one. At its core, it’s a deeply personal meditation on grief, ambition, and the fight to reclaim meaning when the future you believed in vanishes overnight.
Through The Mannequin, I wanted to create an experience that is emotional, terrifying, and human, a ghost story about the dreams and people we refuse to let go of, how we carry pieces of them with us, how they shape the spaces we live in. A portrait of dreams that fester when left in the dark too long, The Mannequin is not simply about death. It’s about what remains.
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