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Creator of ‘Dear White People’ Crafting Horror Film in Tribute to Black Women

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Dear White People

Justin Simien, Writer/Director of the hit film and show Dear White People, has already begun casting for his upcoming horror debut.  While talking to Indiewire, Simien chatted about his hit Netflix show, his transition into horror and the importance of black faces in film.

In recent years, the horror genre has seen a shift into mainstream culture. What was once an underdog genre is now being widely accepted.  This can be attributed to the introduction of rich, heavy themed, storylines.

Films like Get out, Hereditary, and A Quiet Place tackle the horror genre in a more artful way. This change has drawn in a new wave of diverse horror fans through social and emotional commentary. Even the box office is noticing the momentum; You can’t deny, people love a good horror movie!

Get Out Jordan Peele

Via Vox

Simien is not one to shy away from controversy. His second season of Dear White People – which is now streaming on Netflix – tackled racial issues with satire. Simien called the show highly stylized with a “presentational” visual style and a score that matches.

“The cinema I grew up with didn’t have black people in it, and with very few exceptions,” said Simien to Indiewire. “Spike [Lee] and Ernest Dickerson, in particular with Do The Right Thing, brought a lot of the French New Wave, brought stuff from silent movies, just brought to bare a lot of cinematic techniques that before them no person of color would ever find themself in. You have to go back to Oscar Micheaux before you can see anything that looks like cinema with black people in it, or that’s about central black characters.”

Dear White People

Via Collider

His new venture will be a satire-horror film with the same feel as Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Get Out.

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.”

Simien also said Bad Hair would honor his mother, aunts and the other black women in his life.

Image result for dear white people

via Rolling Stone

“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,” 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.”

As a fan of Dear White People, I think Bad Hair will be a beautifully crafted dark-comedy horror. I imagine it being in the same satire as an episode of Tales From the Crypt, Creepshow, Tales From the Hood, etc. With his score influenced by Stanley Kubrick, Bad Hair could be a wickedly fun time.

Shooting for Bad Hair begins this summer.

What do you think of this change up from Dear White People? Are you excited to see Simien’s horror debut? Let us know in the comments.

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‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

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It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

Evil Dead Rise

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

High Desert Hell
The Gemini Project

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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

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Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

Happy Sad Confused

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

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Jake gyllenhaal presumed innocent

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.

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