Céline Roustan
There’s something f*cking strange in the neighborhood”, Cami declares to her friends as she returns to the salon. Shook to the core after an encounter with a ‘white white girl’ her entrance announces an impending threat lurking beyond the parlour doors and with this the premise for Hair Wolf is set. Cleverly using horror tropes, in her festival favorite short writer/director Mariama Diallo builds an inventive and highly engaging narrative rooted in the reality of cultural appropriation.
“I was misheard as saying ‘Brains’ and in that moment, the film was born.”
“A few years ago, I was standing outside my apartment building and noticed a synthetic braid lying on the ground”, Diallo explains when asked about the inception of her film. “I pointed it out to my friend and said ‘Braid’, but I was misheard as saying ‘Brains’ and in that moment, the film was born.” Given the topics that Hair Wolf actually tackles, horror is the perfect genre to push Diallo’s concept to its limit, while adding a satirical element to the script not only makes the watching experience more fun, it gives the story both depth and nuance.
Just like any narrative inspired by topical issues, Diallo explains that a lot of elements contributed to the screenplay. “I made Hair Wolf amidst the rise of the Instagram Aesthetic”, says the filmmaker, pointing out that she had noticed a trend where “the white users tended to darken their skin with self-tanning and bronzer, while the darker skinned women moved in the opposite direction”. For a twelve minute film, Hair Wolf truly nails the influence of social media on cultural appropriation and its complexities. Comparing this thirst for black culture to a vampiric impulse, Diallo hopes to illustrate this “weird American dance”, which she describes as a “naked craving of black culture that exists simultaneously with a denial of black worth”.
Filmed over three night, Diallo admits the production “made most of us feel like vampires by the end of the shoot”.
Through her over the top premise, Diallo confronts the viewer head-on to the fact that cultural traditions are used as trends, and while the villain here is quite obvious, we are made to understand that it is not only the friends preyed upon here, but also those traditions. Hair Wolf is definitely one of those films that should be watched multiple times to really appreciate all its layers.
Though the timely premise of Hair Wolf is arguably its standout feature, the visual flair of the film is also quite outstanding. DP Charlotte Hornsby, whose work we’ve featured in the past (Real Talk, Lucia, Before and After), helps to foster the perfect vibe for the short through her striking cinematography. The distinct color palette not only makes the film visually enticing, but paired with the production design, art direction and costume design, these elements of production all contribute to creating a memorable aesthetic, which works to heighten the screenplay.
Hair Wolf was a hit on the festival circuit back in 2018. After its premiere at Sundance, where it was awarded the Short Film Jury Award: US Fiction, it had an impressive run with notable stops at SXSW and Palm Springs ShortFest. Since the film’s success, Diallo has directed another short, White Devil, which premiered at TIFF 2021 and was recently selected at SXSW 2022. Her feature debut Master, featuring Regina Hall, was included in the Sundance 2022 program and has since been released on Prime Video. She is currently working on writing her next script.