Justin Simien appeared on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast to talk about Season 2 of his hit Netflix series “Dear White People” where the writer-director-showrunner revealed that before going back to work on Season 3 he will shoot his long-planned horror film Bad Hair.
“[Bad Hair] follows a girl from Compton who doesn’t have the right look,” Simien shared. “She doesn’t have the right hair, she doesn’t have the right face, she doesn’t have the right skin color. She wants to be a VJ in the late ’80s, early ’90s and she makes a bit of a Faustian bargain with this woman who takes over the network where she’s at and she ends up with this hair, this weave in her head, that may or may not have a mind of its own.”
Even though it reminds me of the J-horror craze, the site notes that he described the film as being “cheeky” and in the tradition of horror satires like Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Get Out. He also added the film is a tribute to his mother, aunts and the other black women in his life.
“It’s my way of taking my frustration of what I feel like black women are going through, who we rely on for so much – politically, culturally, just in terms of the family dynamic – and we put them through hell,” said Simien. “We make them suffer quiet little deaths just to be seen in our culture and I wanted to translate that, in my own way, into a very weird horror-satire love letter to that experience.”
Simien tells the pod that he has already started casting and will shoot this summer.
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