Even as the film sometimes slips into cliche and broad slapstick, with Shelley at one point inadvertently pulling the hair weave off the head of one of Amira’s friends, Barris and Hill’s screenplay never removes its finger from the pulsing wound of contemporary social rupture — probing and poking into issues around class, race, economics, gentrification, gender, religion, cultural appropriation, privilege and unconscious bias.

“When I was born, Freddie Roman was getting his first hair weave,” the comedian Steven Scott said.

The dark comedy horror is “only a film,” they say, but the story’s underlying messages of harmful hair weave and false beauty standards for Black women had a lasting effect.

"They said: 'Go home, take those braids out of your hair- this is not our look.' But the hairstyle they did want was a straight hair weave, which is not natural. They wanted me to adhere to European standards of beauty," she said.

He often wears an elaborate hair weave, but today his head is shorn smooth.