the moss-haired girl she see trees
covered in black moss
and made herself a wig maybe the hair in
the tree was
enchanted
it's fun to think about let's get to
work
rosemary's baby the shining dress to
kill
these are filmmakers who are following
in the tradition of alfred hitchcock
let's put all of our obsessions in this
movie let's have blood
spurting out of the elevator at slow
motion for reasons unknown
this is the genre where you can both be
incredibly experimental as a filmmaker
but also make a connection to popular
culture must be glued down
or really good relaxing my don't
move like that and i'm part cherokee
it's a weave i think you find that these
movies can slip in these pieces of
social commentary that
you just can't do in other films you
know in a perfect world
a woman would be able to wear her hair
the way she wants to
i can't fault you for doing whatever it
takes
to get where they keep trying to keep us
from getting
rosemary's baby is a film that is
literally about a woman who gives birth
to satan's love child but when you see
the movie
the experience of watching it is much
more about the fragility of
women and the way in which they are not
protected in our society
it's actually like this very rich movie
about the american
experience and i wanted to do something
that was like that but about the black
american experience because i really
believe
that the more specific black filmmakers
and black story tellers can be about the
black experience it makes the story even
more universal because the black
experience really is
the quintessential american experience
it's
anna bledsoe coming at you with the
hottest of the hot
thank you so much we just lean a little
bit more rock
than urban year i can't tell you
how gratifying it was to discover that
trying to make a black horror movie was
not this profoundly
new and groundbreaking idea black films
and black filmmakers are just excluded
from
cinema history maybe they talk about
oscar me show spike lee
john singleton robert townsend get
mentioned but there are
dozens if not hundreds of other black
filmmakers that were working
every year through these same time
periods so movies like ganja and hess
like a lot of black art falls into the
blind spots
of cinema history who does your hair no
one
me if you went to any other floor in
this tower
for a job interview you wouldn't get
past reception
bad hair was an outline and a rough
draft a dream
and a prayer and a wish and then when
get out happened
it was like oh black horror the industry
kind of like woke up to that
and we were able to get our movie
financed as well with bad hair
you're gonna feel a little bit of brian
de palma in there you're gonna feel
polanski certainly some hitchcock i
tried to have that stuff in my
subconscious and work within the
limitations that a movie being made in
1989
would have and so a lot of the hair
effects are practical effects
we utilize split screens i love a good
zoom
we shot it on film black girls are
showing up to this movie and showing up
to movies like this potentially for the
first time
how often does the black character get
to even be a final girl
not very often i think about jada
pinkett's
character in demon night and and what a
surprise that is when that character
actually triumphs and survives it
doesn't really
take into account the realities of being
a woman in ways that we're able to do
with the movie like bad hair
make her the center of the narrative not
just sort of an object
for the audience to just kind of project
a fantasy on
every stage of the process of writing
the script i needed the black women in
my village to be there so that i could
make sure that i was saying something
truthful about their experience
and that i wasn't leaving something out
because i couldn't see it because it
fell into my blind spot
i'm not changing who i am just to appeal
to some whiter
wider demographic no one's asking you to
change who you are
just the way you look it's not that big
of a deal
you know how long it took me to get here
i'm
sick of this it's very exciting to
be a black storyteller and to be able to
take the reins in that way
something bad has happened
[Music]
what is you doing i haven't seen all the
jason movies you ain't got to check to
see if she dead
come on
you