Jackson native Cody Heuer stars in horror-film production overseas

The email was clearly fake.

"I just got an email from some guy in Morocco," recalled Cody Heuer. "I thought, 'This isn't real. This doesn't make any sense.'"

The sender had sent him pieces of a script. A script for a horror film. Heuer was to read over the lines and send back an audition tape. So that's what he did.

He was, after all, a professional.

His experience was mostly stage, from Jackson High School through his time at Southeast Missouri State University's River Campus to the Bigfork Summer Playhouse in Montana, but he'd done a share of film work, too. He figured this Moroccan director found him through IMDB.com or something.

He sent off his video and again was surprised to get another email -- this one from a different Moroccan.

Cody Heuer poses for a photo outside of the Bedell Performance Hall on the Southeast Missouri State University River Campus on Wednesday in Cape Girardeau. Heuer was a lead actor in "Little Horror Movie" and a graduate from Southeast and Jackson High School.Andrew J. Whitaker

She was, she explained, the director's assistant. Her boss had loved Heuer's tape absolutely. So much so that he'd stopped taking other auditions. The role was Heuer's. Her job now was to get him to Morocco.

While exciting, the prospect was inescapably odd, Heuer recalled.

"I was paranoid," he said. "There was a part of me that thought, 'If you give this guy your bank information, everything will be gone by tomorrow morning.' ... I didn't meet any of the other actors until I got on the third flight to Casablanca."

On the plane, he'd busied himself working through the 103-page script. "Little Horror Movie," as the project was called, seemed somewhere between a travel story gone wrong and a found-footage thriller. He would be Mark Dole, camera-toting traveler.

Cody Heuer poses for a photo outside of the Bedell Performance Hall on the Southeast Missouri State University River Campus on Wednesday in Cape Girardeau. Heuer was a lead actor in "Little Horror Movie" and a graduate from Southeast and Jackson High School.Andrew J. Whitaker

"It was just a really interesting, creepy story," Heuer said.

And then, armed with a script and speaking neither French nor Arabic, he was in Casablanca.

The first day of shooting, he found the director, Jerome Cohen Olivar, had cut or changed roughly two-thirds of the script. Such was his prerogative, considering he was self-funding the film.

This spontaneity, Heuer learned, was an integral part of Olivar's filmmaking style. Bald, stocky and enthusiastic, the director seemed to enjoy fleshing out ideas on the fly, usually with swear words thrown in.

"On stage, I hate improv," Heuer said. "It's terrifying to me."

But, "It had to be real," insisted Olivar.

Even after shooting started, Heuer said, he and his costars struggled to completely shake a sense of incredulity.

"We thought we were living in a conspiracy," he joked. "We thought it might be like a literal 'Blair Witch Project.'"

But in reality, Heuer was just earning another film credit for his resume and taking a series of outlandish behind-the-scenes pictures for his website, ranging from in-costume selfies to bloody footprints winding up a marble staircase.

"I don't want to give anything away, but at one point, the three characters get buried alive and only one of us comes out," he said. "I mean, we loved it. It was so creepy."

He spent seven weeks in Casablanca in total. The film is in post-production, slated to premiere in the spring.

Between now and then, Heuer said he's arranging to shadow Olivar in Los Angeles as he completes the film's production. And from there -- who knows? Hopefully Paris, Heuer mused, only half-joking.

"It was definitely an adventure," he said. "It was just a wild ride."

tgraef@semissourian.com

(573) 388-3627

Pertinent address:

Casablanca, Morocco