How Bill Posley And Jonathan Colomb Created An Innovative New Horror Antagonist In ‘Bitch Ass’ [Interview]

SXSW 2022 saw the premiere of one of the more interesting independent horror movies in years with Bitch Ass. Directed by Bill Posley and co-written by Posley and Jonathan Colomb (who also shares producer credits), it’s an innovative horror tale that follows a masked Black serial killer, Bitch Ass (an intimidating Tunde Laleye, and yes that’s the character’s murderous moniker), who has built his home into an elaborate series of murderous large scale games in order to exact a campaign of revenge.

I spoke with Posley and Colomb about the film’s origins, the development of the ‘Bitch Ass’ character, and the elaborate games they created for the film.

Bitch Ass is such an interesting film. Can you tell me about its origins?

Bill Posley: It started out with me and John having dinner with our partners, and [there are] usually sidesteps out of the conversation, so we were just sitting off to the side. [I was] like ‘Hey man, can I tell you about an idea I had?’ He said ‘what?’ ‘Dude, what about a Black serial killer-slasher movie, but set in the 90’s?’ John asked ‘You mean like The People Under The Stairs?’ and I was like ‘Oh my god, you’re my soulmate… how did you know this movie?’

It kind of started there, and I told him the only thing I wanted [was for] the kid to get bullied in the Black neighborhood for being different, and the thing, the name that they called him was ‘Bitch Ass,’ and that was also the name of the movie. And again John said ‘stop talking, I already told you I’m in.’ From there we just kept emailing, calling each other. We’d meet up for walks. We just kept talking about, like, what did that look like? How do we actually, you know, tackle things that we’d like for the movie from movies in the 90’s? We had backstory, we wanted it to be somewhat of a revenge thriller. We wanted it to be People Under The Stairs-meets-Tales From The Hood-meets-Saw, and the rest was us developing that character slowly.

Tony Todd’s narration says it’s the first Black serial killer with a mask in film. Is that a true fact of film history?

BP: So here’s the thing… we had Googled. We talked to horror experts. We had searched and searched and searched and we still have yet to find one. If it exists, we would love to be proven wrong and we will stop claiming to be it. We are not crazy, or, you know, we’re not dogmatic with it, but we’ve had SXSW
XSW
people watch it, we’ve had horror websites, podcasts, fringe horror people review it, watch it. Not one human has been able to tell us another one.

Totally.

Jonathan Colomb: And to piggyback on that, I think what’s interesting is it’s not in the way of, like, ‘can you believe this idea of a Black, masked serial killer? We came up with it,’ it’s more like, ‘can you believe there’s never been a Black, masked serial killer that any of us can recall off the top of our heads?’ How insane is that?

Yeah, I’m genuinely not aware of any! How did you get Tony Todd for that intro and outro?

BP: Begging. Pleading. We initially tried to get Clarence Williams III because we thought Tony Todd was way [unlikely], so [we thought] Clarence Thomas III because of Tales From The Hood. Bringing in some of the comedy, and it’s really a house of horrors that they walk into… unfortunately he passed away a week after we reached out. Then we kicked it around, and we were like ‘oh man, who else could we get?’ then ultimately ‘why not Tony Todd? I know it’s crazy, but why not?’

We talked to his manager, and he asked us to write him a letter so we did, and we sent him the trailer. It was just us just telling him how much of a hero he was to us and how influential he was, and then on a random day his manager’s like, ‘Tony read your letter, and he wants to call you.’ I was like ‘Oh my gosh, this is crazy!’ So he called and said ‘I love the trailer. Love what you guys are trying to do. I want there to be more Black people in this space, in this genre space.’

It’s great that he connected with your vision for the film. The character of Bitch Ass is also so cool; always in a suit, massive but proper, obsessed with games. How did you develop the specificity of that character?

JC: We had a real picture in our head of who young Cecil was, because I there’s a lot of Bill and I both in young Cecil. I think he and I similarly shared the idea that when we were just sort of young kids, we were both happy. We’re both bullied a little bit, which is, I think, kind of why we are how we are now so we had that in our mind. But then when you start thinking… if you were a bullied, heavier young kid, what would you want to grow up to be? How would you want to look and feel if you wanted to show people that you weren’t that anymore? So this idea of a gigantic, hulking, fit, strong person was really important to us.

I know Tunde, who ended up playing Bitch Ass, [he] just reached out to us and Bill and I hopped on Zoom with him, and the minute he showed up, and you saw him with with his hair and his features and how strong and big he was, we were like ‘well that’s Bitch Ass, that’s adult Bitch Ass, that’s exactly what we want to see.’

There’s definitely a larger than life energy there, and I love this specificity in putting victims in games that are deadly versions of just regular children’s games. Was that always part of the conception?

BP: We just wanted to[figure out] what makes him [unique …] after what happened to him, he was kind of arrested in his development, kind of stunted in his growth… board games just seemed to be the right mix of things. You know, this guy, this kid grew up to play games… and you know the other thing too [is] that we wanted […] our killer to be a little bit more cerebral, especially when we’re talking about a killer of color. We didn’t want it to just be this big Black guy beating up Black people. I didn’t want to fall into that and to just make that ‘the thing.’

I wanted our killer to be a little bit more Jigsaw and a little bit more creative, and to just use his brain in a way that, you know, kind of defied the stereotype of both the genre and of Black people. And so we’re like, oh, ‘board games, an element of that.’ And then you know, John [Kramer] always makes ‘this point.’ Then the real fun became ‘how do you kill people with Connect Four?,’ you know? ‘Man, what would a giant Mousetrap game look like? How is that Bitch Ass?’ There there was obviously a part where I was sitting around riffing on ‘Man, UNO would be fun… could UNO kill someone?’

Which of the games in this film is your favorite?

JC: Surgeon. It’s my absolute favorite. Part of that is it’s a fun idea that we came up with, the idea that, you know, you’re playing Operation but on a human being. Also, when we were in the film… you know, trying to find a body to turn into your Operation victim was a difficult task, and our wonderful Art Department guy, Jeremy Jonathan White did our art department, he designed that character that’s opened on the table. When you see it open, it’s the absolute most beautiful kill on screen in my opinion. It’s my favorite, bar none.

Everything that we tried to design, we’re like… for budget stuff mostly, but ‘how would this have looked like in the early 90s?’ You know, big squishes and organs and ‘oh man this is exactly like how this person died in a Roger Cor… this is how it would be made if Roger Corman made it.’

Totally! Tell me a little bit more about how you built some of those those major set pieces because they’re complex and appear to be working traps.

JC: Yes, it was a combination of a lot of Home Depot runs. But we kind of had talked to our production designer, Jeremy, and we were just like, ‘okay, we’re going to build some standing sets that we can move games in and out of,’ so each one of them we wanted to have a look and a feel so the room stays the same but we kept redecorating the room as we went through. And so… like with with Jenga, we hung ropes from the ceiling, and built all these pulleys and lever systems, […] one of the things he was adamant about was it actually working and so, we did you know […] when we move a piece the thing goes up, the weights go down and the rope tightens and it all actually worked. It was like puppeteering the actual pieces, and then for Connect Four they went out and built like an actual hexagon… or Drop Four, I should say, for copyright reasons.

BP: Yeah. Be careful, please.

JC: […] So it was all it was all the art department, they did a lot of really intricate work in making sure that those games come to life because we knew that those games were important and had to work in a movie.

BP: I would also add, again, to the idea of like… coming up with these silly, wonderful ideas, and telling our production designer and him taking it so seriously and going ‘great, this is how this is going to work…’ it was really a delight to have somebody that understood and took it so seriously, something that just feels like it probably didn’t need as much seriousness as he gave it.

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Bitch Ass premiered at SXSW.