Filmmaker Jahmil Eady On Tackling Black American Cultural Erasure Through Horror Short ‘Haint’

Home might not always be where the heart is, especially when you were never supposed to be there in the first place. In Jahmil Eady’s folklore horror short Haint, imminent threats to Southern Black culture are on the rise when a series of gentrifiers in their small community mysteriously begin to die. Suspecting supernatural forces at work, a Gullah Geechee laborer (Melanie Nicholls-King), who recently lost her home, has to decide to entangle herself with spirits to assist and save them or leave the unwelcomed to their demise. 
Haint, produced by Indeed x Hillman Grad’s Rising Voices with Lena Waithe, premiered at the HollyShorts Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival and Beyond Fest. Here, Eady speaks with Deadline about the fun of weaving a fantastical and spiritual tale about the real threats of land loss and economic hardships in the Black community.

DEADLINE: Where did the idea for Haint come from? 

JAHMIL EADY: Haint is an amalgamation of a lot of things that keep me up at night. When I was a kid, I had really bad sleep paralysis, and I would get night terrors. I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, which is Gullah Geechee territory. And down there, my family members did not come to my bedside and go, “Oh, it’s just a bad dream. It’s OK.” They said, “It’s the haint.” So matter-of-factly like that, that’s what it is. I was six. So, that stuck with me for quite a long time. In my mid-twenties, I was convinced that a haint was able to slip inside my house at night and sit on my chest [laughs]. So, there’s that element.

Also, there’s this current issue within the Gullah Geechee community where they are facing really bad land loss, and the culture is disappearing in general. The language is disappearing, a result of unsustainable real estate practices and climate change. So, I kept reading these articles in The Guardian and the New York Times about gentrification in the Gullah Geechee Islands and along the coasts about just how rapidly things are disappearing. It was a combination of all of those things that inspired this: the boo hag, the supernatural, real physical threats and real-world impacts. 

DEADLINE: Does this mean you grew up to be superstitious yourself? How much of the film is actually you or fictional?  

EADY: I think it’s both. I grew up in a very Christian household. I was in Sunday school and church. But at the same time, it’s interesting in the South because it’s always about walking with superstition and angels hand in hand. You would always hear someone saying something like, So-and-so’s grandma, who died last year, was walking down the hallway, and family members would be like, “I saw an angel.” And you just have to be like, “Yeah.” So, I think this short film is both for me. That’s where I am with my work. I like to play with genres in general, and this film just happens to be a folk horror film. I just like the fantastical because it’s so much a part of my childhood.

I don’t want to offend anybody. But I like the fantasticalness of the spirit, of spirituality, of just faith and believing in things that you may or may not be able to see. I kind of weave in between those things. I’m a very spiritual person, but I do tend to pull from what I dig from [a variety of religions]. I really dig what the Christians say over here, but there’s something about meditation with the Buddhists. I’m always weaving and finding beauty in a lot of different things. I feel that way with my work. It’s why my work is sort of genre-defying because I think of life as being that way, and how I see the world is that way. 

DEADLINE: Can you talk about the casting of Melanie Nicholls-King as the main character? Did she already speak the Southern Gullah Geechee dialect needed for the story?

EADY: No, she didn’t. But Melanie is a master actor. In pre-production, we were trying to figure out what avenue to go down, where it would make sense, just to try to find somebody who speaks Gullah Creole already. We really wanted authenticity, but we just didn’t have the time to find an actor from South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, or northern Florida who spoke Gullah Creole or Gullah. But Melanie is an actor who I have grown up watching and who is literally in everything. She’s really an amazing character actor, and she’s played really interesting mother roles. She’s actually Trinidadian. That’s probably why she can tap into different accents. 

Also, our other character, the daughter, played by Imani [Lewis], her family is from Dominica, so it’s the same for her being able to tap into what we needed. I also had this really amazing casting director, Candice Alustiza, who’s based in New York, and we talked about getting people who looked like they could be mother and daughter and were able to have the time and do the accents. So, we weren’t able to get the authenticity in a short time frame, exactly, but we’ll have time to do it for the future. Sometimes it’s kind of funny because you would hear a little bit more Caribbean than what Gullah Creole actually is. Gullah Creole is a mix of Southern and [some other] dialects. So I tell my Gullah Geechee family members and community when they watch the film to give me a break [laughs]. They did a great job. 

I also want to mention that we totally lucked out with the actor who plays Rusty. Melvin Campbell was also our language and dialect translator. Basically, I was looking for somebody to translate the script so that I could give it to the actors and so they could have time to practice. He’s based in South Carolina on Hilton Head, which is one of the famous Gullah Islands. He’s in his late 70s, and we asked him if he could translate it, and while he was doing so, he just understood all the nuances of the relationships. I was like, “I know you’re a non-actor and you haven’t acted a day in your life, but would you be Rusty?” And he was just like, “No, no, no, absolutely not.” I just kind worked on him for a little while, and I was like, “Please, you already are Rusty. You know the role.” I really did want that experience of working with a non-actor and having that authenticity, and he really helped to create that. He showed up on set, and even though he was nervous, everybody loved him. 

DEADLINE: For a short film, I was surprised by two things. One, was that we got to see a monster – I thought, because of how short film budgets go, that the presence would be invisible. But no. We do see the creature. Two, the creature’s design looks scary. Talk about what went into that design work. 

EADY: It was my first time designing a creature and collaborating with a creature creator. Cameron Blake, who I worked with, listened to me describe this vision of the sleep paralysis demon sitting on the person’s chest, which is the traditional image of a sleep paralysis demon. So, initially, we thought we would have to find a really small, thin, or even a child who could bend like a contortionist. But then, this amazing actor, Aris Vsetecka, was introduced to us, and Aris is 6’8″. 

DEADLINE: What.

EADY: Yes. 21 years old at the time of filming and 6′ 8″. This was her first film, and she told us it was her dream to be in one. Her idol is Javier Botet, who does a lot of creature work on Guillermo del Toro films. He’s similar to her in the way that he is very tall and thin and has the same flexibility. So, once we met with her, we could see the way she could also contort and bend, and it was such a gift. Then we just built the creature design out from there. What we ended up doing was using tissues because we couldn’t afford to make a full-size costume for a body in such a short period of time. So, Cameron basically used tissue paper, and we folded it on top of each other to create that texture and she spray-painted. 

We initially thought it would be a five to six-hour process to put the makeup on, and it turned into eight hours and then three hours to get it off because it was basically just very thin paper, paint, adhesive, and a few prosthetic pieces on the spine and the ribs. But we really wanted to do it as practically as possible, because there’s nothing quite like having those practical effects and seeing that person towering over Melanie. 

DEADLINE: Can you talk about the generational divide between the mother and daughter in this film? Why include that on top of everything else that’s going on? 

EADY: There is the complicated mother-daughter relationship – a disconnect between the two. One where Cassie, the daughter, believes in protecting the future, while her mother believes in legacy and protecting legacy, and Cassie just feels like it is what it is, and we have to move forward. It’s a story that I’ve had with my own family about how much of the past you carry along with you before it becomes a burden. Or how much of it is mine for me to take? But then, gentrification is the obvious theme that’s happening. Then there’s the rage about a person fighting against Schadenfreude. That feeling of getting glee from seeing other people get their comeuppance.

I think what people have been experiencing, especially Black women, is why do I have to be the bigger person? Why do I have to save somebody from the consequences of their own action? Why do I have to? But really, what this is about is this person realizing that, no, my values have always been rooted in caring for the community, and I’ve always seen myself as a protector. And if I start celebrating other people’s demise, even people who might very well deserve it, where do I start to lose my sense of self? And so that’s basically the real thing I am interested in. The main theme I’m really interested in this point in time, especially in this political climate, is how do we balance not being a Black savior or a super magical Negro or whatever. But also, we do take care of people. We’ve been taking care of people. 

So, it’s like, I don’t know. I don’t have the answer, but I just wanted to kind of raise the question. And I think with the feature, that’s where I’ll have more space to explore it, but it is that balance of at what point does it teeter into saviorhood versus like, well, no, this is my identity and who I am?

DEADLINE: Are you planning on developing this into a feature? 

EADY: Well, I’m developing the world in general because I think there’s just so many folktales, creatures, and stories in our culture that I’m inspired by. But the feature may not necessarily be exactly an extension or an expansion of Haint the short, but it might have the same characters. It’s really the world and the themes that I’m really interested in exploring. So I don’t know if I would call it a proof of concept. More so, I’m excited to expand the world of Haint into a feature film.

DEADLINE: What would you like the audience to take away from your short? 

EADY: I want people to take away that even when you visit a place, you have an impact there. Every day, I daydream about running off to Mexico City, and one of the things that’s really interesting is that a lot of Americans are doing that and impacting the local community. Migrating is what we do as humans, but be aware of your impact on the spaces you visit, whether you’re staying permanently or not, and respect the culture that was there before you. Become part of the community in a respectful way and just be aware of cultural erasure. 

Also, it would be nice for people, on a fundamental level, to look into the Gullah Geechee community. This culture is woven into the tapestry of American culture through a lot of practices, beliefs, foods and many other things.  

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]