Jagged Mind, Hulu’s twisty new queer horror film, opens with a love scene between two women. From its opening moments, it is unquestionably and unapologetically queer. This is exactly why director Kelley Kali was drawn to the project in the first place. “The one thing that really stood out to me that I loved that Allyson [Morgan] the writer did, was that this wasn’t a queer film about people coming out, or like trying to find themselves, it’s like, we just drop into their lives, they are two women dating like any normal person,” she tells PRIDE.
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The film follows Billie (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), a young lesbian who seemingly has a blessed life. She has friends, an active sex life, and an incredible job working for an art gallery. At the same time, however, she’s begun quietly struggling with an increasingly serious issue: her memory has begun to fail her. Blackouts and lost time leave her confused and scared — the one bright light, however, is that she has met someone new, a woman named Alex (Shannon Woodward) who seems almost too good to be true. To explain further would deprive audiences of some of the fun of unpacking the mystery. Suffice it to say, things take twists and turns and dabble into the world of magic and voodoo.
For Kali, who, prior to becoming a filmmaker, worked as an anthropologist and archeologist, treating those aspects with respect was essential. “I said, but we need to be very careful about how we depict Voodoo, it’s a religion, and we can’t continue to perpetuate these negative images of it, we need to respect it,” she explains. To that end, Kali added characters that would enhance and enrich the religious aspect to avoid tokenism and exotification. And that wasn’t the only thing that she changed.
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“Let me tell you, the script that I read was not what you’re watching,” she reveals. “I didn’t think I was gonna get the job, because I went in there with just the opposite of what was already written. Now, the core of the characters was always there, I didn’t change that.” The first change Kali proposed was to move the setting from Manhattan to somewhere more appropriate for the story she wanted to tell — one that was more diverse and culturally rich. “Usually in the Manhattan art galleries, it’s like white art,” she says. “And it’s like, you know, we’ve seen it, and I told the executives that in addition [to changing the location], the script was reading as two white women, so I had said that I think that the lead should be African American or Afro Caribbean and we should have an interracial couple.”
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This was influenced by her upbringing and Kali recognized that it would add more nuance and tension to the dynamic even before darker horror elements came into play. “I come from an interracial couple and I remember what it was like, walking outside with my parents, and it’s not like no one was being aggressive about it. But there were those looks that are like, ‘Oh, they’re together? Okay,’ So that brings on another layer of tension just socially, right, that we don’t have to stress, but it’s there. We all know it. We all live in America, so we know what that feels like,” she explains.
Thankfully, the powers that be shared Kali’s vision and the setting was moved from NYC to Miami, specifically to Little Haiti. “I really pushed to have Haitian Creole spoken in it and not subtitle it, as a little homage to the Haitian community,” she says.
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Then it was just about taking the vision she had in mind and putting it on the screen. “The thing about genre film is you can play; it’s an artist’s playground. There’s no rules, whatever you dream up, you can do,” says Kali, who shares her surprising inspiration for the visual style of Jagged Mind. “You’re not going to [guess] what it is. But the film that inspired me was Ratatouille!”
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“It’s so funny. Everyone’s thinking, I’m gonna give these horror films,” Kali says with a laugh. “There was this tense moment [in Ratatouille] where the camera starts on the chef, and then it pulls out into different locations into the critic. It was so short but I was like, ‘Oh, how if we could bring that into live action with our protagonist and what she’s gone through?’ There was just so much room to play visually.”
