From writer/director Justin Simien, the 1989-set horror satire Bad Hair (available to stream at Hulu) follows Anna (Elle Lorraine), a young woman looking to get ahead in the world of music television who decides to get a weave in the hopes that it will further her career. She soon realizes that her new hair has a mind of its own with rather murderous intentions that could very quickly put an end to her dream of becoming a VJ.

During this 1-on-1 phone interview with Collider, filmmaker Justin Simien chatted about how Bad Hair came about, why a horror satire was the right way to present this story, how he edited and reshaped the film after it screened at Sundance, what led him to Elle Lorraine as his lead, and how they approached the scenes with the hair attacking people. He also talked about how it feels to know that he’s shooting the fourth and final season of Dear White People, whether he sees spin-off possibilities, and how he approaches figuring out what his next project will be.

Collider: It seems like a totally weird backwards world for me to even ask you this, but could you have ever have imagined that you would make a movie that would come out in 2020 in drive-ins?

JUSTIN SIMIEN: No.  The short answer is no but it’s cool. It’s a nice silver lining, at least, to this moment.

How and when did the idea for this come about, and what was it that made you realize this was the idea for this movie?

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Image via Hulu

SIMIEN: I guess it started sometime in 2015. It was after Dear White People premiered at Sundance and it was sparked by a conversation with my producer, Julia [Lebedev]. She had just seen The Wig, which is a Japanese horror film. I rabbit holed down into this sub-genre of hair horror, which is more prevalent in Asian horror films. There are a couple examples of it in America, usually about white men who are balding, and they’re shorts but not a full movie. To me, it was just one of those great B-movie concepts upon which some of my favorite psychological thrillers are built. Rosemary’s Baby is a movie about someone giving birth to Satan’s love child. And so, you take that B-movie premise but you treat it somewhat seriously and you make room for its campy elements.

The thing that I was left with at the end of Rosemary’s Baby is just how some of the most horrifying things that I witnessed in that film exist, in real life, if you take away the mythological and supernatural elements of those films. I also of The Stepford Wives in this way and Body Snatchers. We’re realizing that they’re actually these social critiques in disguise. And so, that really was the beginning of it. The rest of it came from research and obsession. The thing that I noted in every one of the films that I loved and was striving to emulate was that the director’s particular obsessions and eccentricities are what makes those movies feel specific and special and like dreams. I leaned into that, into my own, and that took me to 1989 and into the world of New Jack Swing and this BET-like video station. It all came organically like that.

Why did horror satire feel right? Did you ever consider or try making straight horror, straight satire, or straight comedy? Was it always this mash-up that you felt worked the best?

SIMIEN: I think they’re all mash-ups. The tricky thing is that the things we remember as so-called straight-up horror aren’t actually that. When we talk about genre, it’s usually a marketing term that only matters at the moment it comes out. If I look at Rosemary’s Baby, there’s incredibly campy and hilarious moments in that film, especially when we’re just meeting the neighbors. A Nightmare on Elm Street, when I was growing up as a kid, I thought that was a comedy. I didn’t understand that it was a movie where I’m supposed to feel horrified when the white teenagers get it. To me, they’re always sitting side by side because we’re dealing with the absurd. When I’m in any kind of horror or psychological thriller, I need some acknowledgement that what I’m watching is crazy. You even get it in The Shining with, “Here’s Johnny!” That movie is incredibly seriously but it goes Kabuki theater crazy at the end and it has to, or else the whole thing would just be so dry and dull, if it took itself too seriously. That, to me, just made sense.

And having a second to laugh and take a breath can be really helpful in movies.

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Image via Hulu

SIMIEN: Yeah. With something like Dressed to Kill, which is very problematic in 2020 but one of my favorite Brian De Palma movies, and it’s shot with such weirdness. It’s a drama, on its face. It’s a psychological thriller but it’s also extremely weird. There’s a 20-minute sequence dedicated to a woman getting lost in a museum and trying to remember where she put her gloves. It’s stuff like that, that I always remember of these movies. It’s the blood inexplicably coming out of the elevator in The Shining. It’s those weird moments. None of those are played straight. It’s not straight drama. In this genre, the job, in my opinion, is to create a dream world, and dream worlds work on a different set of logic. They don’t play by the same rules that other movies play by. I just found that really liberating, so I leaned into that.

What are the challenges in finding the right level of camp without it being too much?

SIMIEN: I don’t know. To be honest with you, I feel like, in a lot of ways, my movies are experiments that I then refined later, as TV shows or other movies. There are so many different versions of Bad Hair that we could have cut together. There could have been a far more serious version. There could have been a far more absurd, ridiculous, funny, pure comedy version. I just tried to use my instincts. I think a lot of what I’m realizing that I do in my film work is that I am trying to invent something a little bit different. The way I absorb movies and think about them and imagine them, it’s just a little queer, to use the phrase in its original meaning. I just see it a little bit differently. When I’m making a movie, I’m trying to welcome some people into that point of view maybe but it’s not totally logical either. It’s something that I just try to feel out, in the process

You first screened this at Sundance. How much did the film change between then and now?

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Image via Hulu

SIMIEN: I would say that this version of the film closer matches my intention, in terms of what I was trying to communicate. The Sundance cut is a little more indulgent, it’s longer, and I would say the ending is far more tragic and pitiful, and you can’t quite come back from the ending from Sundance. I just felt like that was doing my audience a disservice one, and also, it wasn’t functioning in the way that I wanted to. When something very terrible happens to the white lead at the end of a horror movie, like when in A Nightmare on Elm Street, she gets sucked back into the house, or in Black Swan, Natalie Portman’s character dies at the end, or even in The Shining, when Jack Nicholson is frozen solid, it registers different to an audience.

Whether we realize it or not, we don’t expect white leads to die. It’s why Psycho continues to work. Even though we all know what’s gonna happen when she gets into that shower, it’s still so shocking that she’s gone for the second half of the movie. When that happens to black characters in horror movies, the reaction is completely different. Because we’re so used to black characters dying quickly or being discarded in horror movies, when it happens, it doesn’t hit like a surprise. It doesn’t hit like a, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe they went there,” moment. It hits like, “Oh, yeah, that’s what always happens.” That isn’t quite the feeling that I wanted at the end of the movie, especially for a group of people – black women, but specifically there’s a lot of queer people in my audience that show up for my films – that I didn’t want to feel just devastated at the end. I wanted to tweak it so that what I was saying felt like we were interrogating the system, and not interrogating the woman or the women in the middle of that system. So, it’s shorter, it’s leaner, and I think it’s a more fun watch. I think that what’s left on the cutting room floor from Sundance is still very interesting and I’m excited that Hulu was really cool about letting me eventually show audiences that version of it, at some point in this release schedule.

Did you know going into that Sundance screening that you were always going to continue to shape and edit the film after that, or was it that screening that lead to you doing that?

SIMIEN: I wasn’t sure. We’d had some test screenings, at that point, and I’d gotten some feedback from general audiences, but Sundance was really my first chance to really see how the movie was gonna hit and register with people. When I do weird stuff in movies or in my TV show, to me, it always makes sense but I’m never quite sure how people will take it. I’m sticking musical elements, satire, horror, drama, and social commentary all together, and that tracks for me but I don’t know if that will track with a general audience who may or may not be familiar with my work. That was a big aha moment on a bunch of levels because I had a lot of experimental question marks about what would work, going into Sundance? You unveil it to the world, you get reviews, you’re meeting people on the street, and you’re getting feedback, just watching it with audiences. I knew that after Dear White People went to Sundance, I was devastated a little bit that I couldn’t go back into the cut. I had that opposite problem that most directors have, where the studio was happy with the cut and I was like, “I wish I could do something.” So, in the back of my mind, I wanted to make sure that door would be open, if I needed to go through it and keep tinkering, and that’s exactly what I did.

What was it like for you to have the Sundance experience again, with several years in between? Did it feel very different? Do you feel very different, as a person and as a filmmaker, going back again?

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Image via Hulu

SIMIEN: I feel different now, now that I’m through it, but it brought up a lot of insecurities for me. It’s like you’re on an auction block. You’re not just showing your baby to the world, that you’ve been crafting and obsessing over for years, but you’re also trying to sell that baby for the highest amount of money and for the best release. It’s a lot, as an artist and as a person, to process. The things that I make, whether you like them or not, are not movies that you forget you saw. They provoke a reaction in people, and processing that reaction, honestly, is a lot. This year at Sunday was honestly probably the most overwhelmed I had felt, in my career. Even though the first time through was harder because it took longer to sell the movie and people didn’t know who I was, at the time, and it was my first time through the process and I was discovering so many of those beats. This time around, I was feeling my feelings. I was definitely in my feelings a little bit longer, this time around.

What was it that made you see Elle Lorraine as Anna? What was it about her that made you want her for that role?

SIMIEN: She is someone that I’ve known since high school. She was actually in one of my very first student shorts and she’s someone who I just always wanted to work with. She came and did a very small part in Dear White People Season 2. When we were out to people for that lead role, there were a number of names and known people that we were all really excited about but there was just something in the back of my head that made me go, “I really should bring Elle in for this,” because she gives me Black Shelley Long vibes. She’s beautiful but she’s also very frail, and she can be strong. There was just something going on with her that I thought was interesting. And then, she really exceeded all expectations. It was a really competitive role. There were a lot of fantastic actors out for it but when she came in, I just knew it in my bones that this was her part, and eventually, everyone else knew it, too. That tape that she did, with me and Carmen Cuba, as more people watched it in the producer camp, we were all very clear that she is a person that we could hinge the entire movie on. She had to make choices that are inspired by the script but also really unexpected and compelling.

What was it like to put this wild ensemble together?

SIMIEN: To me, it was fun. I love ensemble movies, or ensemble pieces, as is probably evident in the things that I’ve made. What I love about them is that you can have really big stars that you come into the movie with a lot of personal investment in. When you see Vanessa Williams on screen, you can’t help but think of all of the other roles that she’s played. I think that’s so fun to balance that with a person like Elle, or a person like Yaani King, or even a person like Lena Waithe, who is cast a bit too type in this but in a way that we haven’t seen before. I love ensemble casts where it’s familiar faces and new faces, and people you thought you knew but you’re seeing them in a different light. There’s just something about that, that feels really fun. And then, the other part of it is that I just really love collaborating with people who take the storytelling aspect really seriously and who have a personal stake in what the piece is meant to be about. Everybody in this movie had that.

 I love that you even had Usher and James Van Der Beek.

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Image via Hulu

SIMIEN: I know. And some of that was Carmen Cuba. She really likes to think outside of the box for some of these roles. To me, the cast is like going to a great buffet. You want things that will delight and surprise and comfort the audience. You want a nice mix of all of those feelings.

How did you do the scenes with the hair attacking people? What was the most surprising and unexpected thing about having to work with so much hair and make sure that it had its own personality?

SIMIEN: The most unexpected thing was just how much we actually were able to do practically. I had seen what CGI hair effects were and are, and it wasn’t what I was looking for. Of course, anytime the hair does something, there’s digital enhancement. We are in 2020. Tony Gardner and Alterian did the practical effects for this, and Tony is a legend. He worked on a bunch of the Chucky movies, and when I went to his office, he had a bust of Michael Jackson from “Thriller,” so I was like, “Okay, we’re going with Tony.” But we were amazed at reverse photography and putting the hair in water. We were able to get it to do all kinds of things. We were able to get it to look like it braided itself. We were able to get it to swirl in midair, as if it was magic. There were moments when tendrils of hair were being individually puppeteered by people, just off screen.

It was like being a kid in a candy store. It was kind of like when I grew up as a kid and I would watch those featurettes of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas playing with adult toys, essentially, to make their movies. It felt like that. It really was a very wonderful, tangible process. We also shot on film. It just felt like I could touch everything and that everything had texture. It wasn’t all just in my head. It actually had space, in front of the lens. And it was just fun to shoot it that way. Look, I love digital. I think it’s great. But there was something about this that just felt like it needed to be shot on film. The movie is so crazy and ridiculous that it was like, “Let’s ground it with what we can. Let’s ground this in 1989, the best way we can. We have film and we know how they would have done this in 1989.” We just went in with all of that, so that when the movie does go off the rails, which it does by design, you’ve at least had some time in what has felt like the real world.

What’s it like to be doing a fourth and final season of Dear White People? How does it feel to have it be the last season?

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Image via Hulu

SIMIEN: For me, it feels great. Each season, we would go into it, not knowing if we just made the last season, or if we were gonna be invited back to the party, and then there’s this waiting process that just stretches on for months. This way, knowing that it was gonna be the end before we began to write it was just really helpful in guiding what the story had to do. Also some of the things that I’ve just been holding back on because maybe there were crazy for an early season, I can do all of those things now. For me, it’s actually very liberating and freeing. I think this is the right time to conclude this chapter of Dear White People. And I’m so hands on. This was the first TV show I ever did. I didn’t really have a way to shoot other things while I was doing the show. Bad Hair was shot while we were writing the third season of Dear White People and that was nuts. I can’t ever do that again. That was really way too much. I wanna make other movies and other shows, so for me, it’s great. I think the way it’s designed, it should have an ending. It should feel like it’s all one piece. And I’ve got a big idea that I’ve been wanting to do since Season 1 that I finally get to do. For me, it’s all love and all joy.

Do you see spin-off possibilities with any of the characters in the show?

SIMIEN: Definitely. That’ll be up to the appetites of the various people who own and control the Dear White People copyrights but I certainly have a bunch of ideas. There’s a few that have been talked about and floated, and some really unexpected directions that the franchise could go into, should it become a full-fledged franchise.

Do you think the next film that you shoot will be something that you haven’t written yet, or do you think it’ll be something that you’ve been trying to get made for some time?

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Image via Hulu

SIMIEN: It could go either way, honestly. I’m in development on something right now that would be great, if it was my next film. There’s a script that I’ve been attached to for a long time, and that would be great as my next film. And there’s something that I’ve been wanting to make for a long time that could be my next film. I don’t know. My philosophy has always been to throw like a bunch of stuff in the oven and see what’s ready first, and I’m still doing that, so it’s hard to say. I just love this job. I really do. I love making film and I love making TV, so it doesn’t really matter which one goes next. I’m not as precious about that as I used to be or thought I would be, when I was 20-something and dreaming of it. Now that I’m in it and doing it, I’m just like, “Well, what’s ready to go? Let’s do that.”

Does there get to be a certain point where you’ve been trying to get something made for so many years that you finally give up on it, or do you always hold onto those things and wait to see what the right time might be, however far down the road that is?

SIMIEN: Feeling like it’s time to either give up or stop on something, or maybe pause on something, I’m learning is really just a natural part of the process. It doesn’t mean that the thing is done but it may mean that I’m done with it for right now. I’ve just learned to accept that. There are some things that take a long time to make and they never get made because maybe they shouldn’t. Maybe the idea wasn’t really fleshed out, or maybe this isn’t the time for it. There are a hundred maybes. I’m the kind of person who comes up with a hundred things, starts 50 of them, and finishes two of them. In order to do that as an artist, I just have given myself grace to fall in and out of love with things. When it feels like the thing is gonna happen, then I could go forever, and it doesn’t matter how long it takes to get it made. But when I’m still in that developmental phase, I try to flirt with them a little bit, and date them, and not get too committed. It’s just too heartbreaking, when something doesn’t come together. I’ve been through that too many times to get too fixed on something, especially if it’s my idea. As long as I’m alive, I’ll still have access to that idea.

One of the first feature films I wrote is essentially a romance movie. I hadn’t been in a serious relationship at the time and I just knew I shouldn’t make that move at 22. Not that anyone was asking me to but it was one of those scripts that I had in my vault. Now, I’ve been in a long-term relationship and I’ve been in situation-ships, as well. As a writer, I’m more prepared to make that movie. Now to get too woo-woo but I’ve learned to just appreciate it when the universe tells me that it’s not time for something. Even when it hurts, maybe the universe is right. Dear White People and Bad Hair included, when I’m actually there making a thing, I’m so glad that I had whatever experience has led me up to that point because I wouldn’t have felt prepared otherwise.

Bad Hair is available to stream at Hulu.

Christina Radish is a Senior Reporter of Film, TV, and Theme Parks for Collider. You can follow her on Twitter @ChristinaRadish.