Samantha Sherwood, [Samantha Eggar], a beautiful actress and muse for director Jonathan Stryker, [John Vernon], fakes a mental illness to land the role of a disturbingly unstable woman in a film called Audra. Once inside the shuttered asylum, she discovers Stryker has coerced her into method rehearsals and locking herself away so he can audition a fresh crop of younger women in her absence. Furious at the betrayal, Samantha escapes and vows to make him pay.
One of the aspiring Audra stars, Amanda Teuther, [Deborah Burgess], has a nightmare on the way to the audition: she spots a large doll in the road, and when she exits her car to move it, the doll grabs her hand as someone else slips into the vehicle and drives away. Upon waking, she is found by a killer in a hag mask who stabs her to death and seizes her doll, setting a grim tone for what follows.
The next day, the six hopefuls who will audition for Audra arrive at Stryker’s rural New England mansion: stand-up comedian Patti O'Connor, [Lynne Griffin], veteran actress Brooke Parsons, [Linda Thorson], ballet dancer Laurian Summers, [Anne Ditchburn], musician Tara DeMillo, [Sandee Currie], and professional ice skater Christie Burns, [Lesleh Donaldson]. They are greeted by the mansion’s caretaker, Matthew, [Michael Wincott], while Samantha—uninvited—drops in during dinner, stirring tension among the group. A fierce snowstorm traps everyone inside as they begin to size up one another.
That night, Tara and Matthew give in to a moment of privacy in a hot tub as Stryker begins to press Christie into his seductive games. An unseen intruder slips into the tool shed, grabs a sickle, and sharpens its edge, signaling the danger that stalks the house.
The following morning, Christie heads to a nearby pond to ice skate and uncovers Amanda’s doll partially buried in the snow. The masked killer with the sickle strikes again, wounding Christie, who manages to fight back briefly before the killer vanishes and then reappears to sever her head, leaving her body dangling in the forest.
Stryker then humiliates Samantha during a group audition by forcing her to wear the hag mask and pretend to seduce him in front of the others, a cruel display that exposes her vulnerability and his control.
Later that day, a drunk Matthew rides off on a snowmobile in search of Christie. Patti is given an improvised audition with Stryker and grows increasingly furious as he dismisses her talent. While Tara and Laurian rehearse upstairs, Brooke discovers Christie’s severed head in a toilet, a grisly shock that leaves them scrambling for explanations. When they return to the bathroom, the head has vanished, deepening the sense that something beyond their control is at work.
As the day wears on, Laurian is stabbed to death during a dance in her room, another brutal reminder that the glamour of Audra masks a deadly reality.
Brooke and Stryker share a final, fatal moment, caught in a robed assailant’s blast that sends them tumbling from the second floor; Stryker’s body crashes through a window. Tara, finding the scene, tries to flee but discovers the cars are dead in the snow. She hides in Stryker’s prop shed, moving between mannequins and shadows as the killer closes in. Tara is stalked through the shed, chased through the ventilation ducts, and finally murdered with an axe after a brutal pursuit.
In the aftermath, Samantha discovers Patti in the kitchen, and they toast with champagne while discussing Audra’s supposed madness. Samantha confesses she killed Stryker and Brooke in a fit of rage, but Patti reveals her own motive: she has murdered the other women to eliminate the competition. The pair collide in a tense confrontation, and Patti fatally stabs Samantha with a butcher knife. Some time later, Patti—now incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital—performs a monologue from Audra for a group of fellow patients, though they pay her little mind, leaving the winner of this deadly audition as the silence that surrounds the room.
