SXSW 2022: Aisha Dee, Hannah Barlow, And Kane Senes Talk Social Media And Bullying Horrors In Sissy

Sissy finds Cecilia and Emma, who were best friends as kids, rekindling their friendship when they run into each other a decade later. But when Cecilia is invited to Emma’s bachelorette weekend, she ends up stuck in a remote cabin with her childhood bully and the scent of revenge in the air. I spoke with actress Aisha Dee and writers/directors Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes about the Australian horror-comedy film during its premiere at SXSW.

Aisha Dee (The Bold Type, Sweet/Vicious, Channel Zero) plays Cecilia, a mental health influencer who ends up reconnecting wit her childhood friend. The film puts social media influence and the trauma of bullying at the center of a genre-bending horror story. “I feel like a lot of us go through [bullying] as children. It’s deeply personal,” Hannah Barlow told me in our interview. “[It was also about] responding to our generation’s dealings with social media and the impact on our mental health and the rise of con artistry in social media. It’s a wonderful vehicle and tool for people who kind of slip through the cracks.”

Through the lens of social media, they wanted to discuss influencers and if these are the right people for our youth to be looking up to. “We’re all worshipping false gods, right? But we put them there,” said Kane Senes, calling Sissy an “origin story.” “If this was a comic book movie, this would be the origin story of Joker. We definitely watched that film and we’re like, ‘Oh wow, there's definitely some similarities here, depicting the mental health of a villain.”

The creatives mashed up several tones in the making of Sissy. “It was equal parts friendship, a coming-of-age film, a comedy, but then also a slasher film, a horror film,” said Senes. “And trying to find a way that the horror elements and the violence is a metaphor for [the] violence that we inflict upon ourselves with social media, with bullying, with friendships that fall apart, and can lead to childhood trauma and the ramifications of all of that.”

Aisha Dee opened up about how Cecilia reminded her of her younger self, making it easy to feel empathy and love for her character. “The movie is not a story of Cecilia unraveling and losing her mind, which is what it might seem like on the surface. To me, it's always felt like it's a story about Cecilia stepping into her power for the very first time and and finding her voice,” Dee shared with me. “It's a positive, inspiring story of someone speaking for the first time, growing self-empowerment.”

This also isn’t the first time Dee has played a character with a focus on social media. She played Scarlet social media lead Kat in Freeform’s The Bold Type for five seasons. “That was actually what really attracted me to the project. It felt like it was saying something so different from The Bold Type and it still felt like there was a very strong female gaze on it,” said Dee. “It felt kind of campy in a way that I really loved. Honestly [Kat and Cecilia] would probably think of social media in the completely opposite way, but that's beautiful and that's what social media is, what everything is. I'm at a point in my life where I'm just trying to acknowledge the duality that exists in everything, so social media is another example of that.”

Dee mused about what would happen if the two social media mavens crossed paths. “Cecilia would probably end up on the cover of the magazine. She would end up running the company,” shared Dee, with Barlow joking: “And killing all of its staff members, bit by bit.” Dee laughed, “Yeah, so we're not going to do a crossover episode. The Bold Type girls need to stay alive and safe.”

Sissy explores many twists and turns during its 102 minute run time, the biggest coming in the final act. “That ending was kind of always something that we worked backwards from. It couldn't have ended any other way,” said Senes. “If you look at it in a traditional sense you may or may not see it that way, but we're rooting for Cecilia. That's the goal at least. The audience had to love Cecilia. She's our lead character, the film was named after her, so we had to pay that off and leave people with our take on a twisted happy ending.”

Following the film’s debut at SXSW, Sissy will head to horror streaming platform Shudder.