Dear White People creator on telling black womens stories in B-movies – Polygon

Given that the Sundance Film Festival specializes in independent, idiosyncratic cinema, its home to a lot of far-outside-the-box visions. At Sundance 2020, few of those visions could compete with the sheer weirdness of Bad Hair, a horror-comedy about an up-and-coming black VJ whose weave develops a taste for blood.

The latest from Dear White People writer-director Justin Simien, Bad Hair is set in 1989 (the year of the weave, Simien says), and it stars Elle Lorraine as Anna, a TV executive whose flashy new boss (Vanessa Williams) orders her to update her look or be fired. Anna complies, but the process of having hair sewn onto her scalp is bloody and traumatizing, and the new hair has a perverse mind of its own. We sat down with Simien at Sundance to talk about Bad Hairs Korean influences, its complicated politics, and the difficulties of working with evil hair.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Youve said Bad Hair was partially inspired by the Korean horror film The Wig, which led you down a path of obsessing over Asian hair-horror. Do you have a personal Best Evil Hair Movies list?

Justin Simien: The Wig and Exte: Hair Extensions are pretty hard to beat. Like a lot of great Korean horror movies, they use the premise to go into all kinds of places like, The Wig is going into trans issues. Theyre both really out-there movies. It felt like there was a blueprint there to create something new, but American, which I was shocked hadnt happened already. On the mens side of things, there was Hell Toupee, an episode of Amazing Stories about a toupee from hell, and [the anthology Body Bags] features a balding guy who gets this stuff that sparks evil hair. I thought, Thats interesting territory for a movie.

And then the next step for me was to find really smart black woman and ask, Hey, Im not a black woman, but I feel like I have something to say here. What are your experiences? So I talked to women who were getting weaves in 1989. The weave styling, the way we do Annas hair in the film, is the technique of the time, aside from the blood and the witchcraft. As horrifying as the weave techniques sounded to me, the real horror I wanted to express was the feeling that black women constantly have to choose between themselves and their ambitions.

Coming as you are is never the first option. You have to figure out, What do they want? And then, What parts of myself do I have to cut off to fit in the box of what they want? Thats the horror that women were communicating to me, and thats when I got excited about this film, because now were talking about a system. Were not moralizing a womans choice, were exploring a system where choices are presented, but are they ever really choices? If youre told, Get a weave or be fired, is that a choice?

Bad Hairs tone is so complicated its camp, its a drama about cultural appropriation and racial discrimination, theres gory body horror. How did you navigate putting all these different things on top of each other?

Im just listening to the melody in my own head. I recognize that oftentimes, its not a melody other people are singing. [Laughs] But I love movies when theres nothing else like them. We had to get used to Brian De Palma. We had to get used to Stanley Kubrick. We had to get used to Roman Polanski Im not going into the horrific nature of his real life and politics. As filmmakers, white men make us used to the art they make. So part of it is, these things feel right in my soul, so Im going to blend them in the way that feels right to me. Dear White People was the same way.

When I rewatch some of my favorite movies, Im surprised I remember Carrie differently from when I watch it. Same with The Shining, and Body Snatchers, Dressed To Kill, The Wicker Man. They actually have these incredible screwball-comedy moments, and sci-fi moments and camp, B-movie elements. And they just go together. Whats the unifying thing about them all? That director is obsessed with all those things, so they just put them in their movies. Thats why Vertigo is so brilliant, even though nothing about it makes any fucking sense, or should work. Hitchcock was just truly obsessed with those things. I just wanted to give myself the experience of following that. Especially when its like, No ones tried to do this before, and Im probably not supposed to do this. Thats when Im like, Okay, Im gonna do that.

Whats involved in directing an evil weave? Some of the hair effects in Bad Hair are CGI, but you use a lot of puppetry and stop-motion practical effects, too.

The company that did it is called Alterian. Tony Gardner, who innovated a lot of special effects, we had a conversation early on about how the concept is nuts, so we gotta ground people in a reality that feels physical. Between shooting on film and using real hair, it felt like the kind of moviemaking I grew up thinking I would get to do. Not being in an antiseptic computer lab where youre punching in data and seeing things on the screen. I grew up watching George Lucas basically play with what looked like toys to make Star Wars, and Steven Spielberg working with puppets. So it felt like a fun way to make the movie. But its also a way to ground the ridiculousness of it. As unbelievable as it is, youre seeing it happening. Even when were accentuating the effects shots with digital effects, theres that base there of real hair, really doing things really grabbing people, really braiding itself.

Whats your best hair-wrangling story?

There was just hair everywhere, all the time. You know, it was funny, cause we were actually shooting on film, and Check the gate when we were clearing the camera was not a euphemism. We really had to check the gate, because oftentimes there was hair in the gate. [Laughs] On this movie, hair was just in all sorts of places you didnt think hair should be. We would all go home at the end of each day pulling strands out of various orifices and nooks and crannies. I dont have any horror stories, but the thing about practical effects is, you come up with all this stuff Alterian tested for a long time but then you get on set, and you really have no idea what its gonna do, how its gonna look, whether its gonna work. You got to find out on time and in budget, with actual film rolling through the camera.

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Dear White People creator on telling black womens stories in B-movies - Polygon