In 2014, writer-director Justin Simien burst onto the scene with his explosive film, “Dear White People.” Back before the current landscape of “wokeness,” Simien had created a film that tackled the issue of race head-on. Since then, he’s moved to the world of TV, specifically Netflix, where he took his film and turned it into a successful series.
But after two critically-acclaimed seasons of Netflix’s version of “Dear White People,” Simien is ready to tackle a new feature film before returning to the series. In an interview with IndieWire, the filmmaker said his next film will be the horror film “Bad Hair,” and will begin production this summer.
“[‘Bad Hair’] follows a girl from Compton who doesn’t have the right look,” said Simien. “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.”
“It’s my way of taking my frustration of what I feel like black woman 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,” he continued. “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.”
After the incredible box office and critical success of “Get Out,” there’s clearly a need for thoughtful, topical horror-thrillers in the film industry. And Simien is definitely the type of filmmaker capable of bringing just that to audiences.
Simien goes on to say the film will be “cheeky” and fall firmly into the genre of horror satire, similar to the aforementioned “Get Out.”