Justin Simien Re-Teaming With ‘Dear White People’ Producers for Horror-Satire ‘Bad Hair’
Hot off his major success with both the film and series versions of Dear White People, director Justin Simien has found a new, extremely exciting project. Simien, no stranger to examining and commenting on American race relations in his work, will direct Bad Hair, a movie about a singer who gets a weave in order to be taken seriously in the industry, but might’ve made a bigger mistake than she realized.
Simian is pairing back up with his Dear White People producers Julia Lebedev, Eddie Vaisman, and Oren Moverman of production company Sight Unseen for the film. Here’s the premise, according to Deadline:
Paralleling the rise of New Jack Swing in 1989, Bad Hair is a horror satire that follows an ambitious young woman who gets a weave in order to survive the image obsessed world of music television. Her professional success comes at a higher cost than anticipated, however, when she discovers her new hair may have a mind of its own.
This is, frankly, an awesome idea for a movie, and indicates an exciting rise in a certain genre of black filmmaking. While this particular brand of specifically black horror-satire is not new, Get Out was the film that caused Hollywood to turn around a realize, oh, this is something lots of people will go to the theater to see. And man, a horror-comedy about the politics of “good hair” in which the villain is an evil weave? I can’t wait to see this.
The movie already has a teaser website with an unsettling video that Deadline says will be updated as the film goes through production.