108 minutes, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles
Directed by: Sion Sono
Starring: Chiaki Kuriyama, Ren Osugi

Watch [the trailer] on YouTube.

Showtimes: THU July 5, 8:30pm and SUN July 7, 3:30pm at Japan Society
[Buy Tickets]. Director Sion Sono will attend both screenings.
Note: "Buy Tickets" links will take you to the IFC Center website (for shows at IFC Center) and to Japan Society website (for shows at Japan Society). Tickets for each venue must be purchased separately.

Imagine the grossest thing on earth. Chances are you're thinking of a big swimming pool filled with oily, black hair and you're floundering in the middle of it with hair getting up your nose, tickling your ears, going down your shirt, getting in your mouth, clogging your throat, cutting off your breath...ever since Masaki Kobayashi included "The Black Hair" in his 1965 ghost film Kwaidan, hair and horror have been linked in a dark marriage. In EXTE, director Sion Sono (of the cult hit Suicide Club) pushes the fear of hair to the edges of sanity and beyond.

Chiaki Kuriyama (Go Go Yubari from Kill Bill Vol. 1) is an assistant hairstylist at a small town salon, charmingly named after multiple murderer Gilles de Rais. Her sister is a beer disposal unit who dumps her daughter on her doorstep and stumbles off into the night. Longtime character actor Ren Osugi (Nightmare Detective) gets to kick out the jams and turn on the crazy face as a morgue janitor obsessed with hair who steals a female corpse from his workplace fridge that won't stop growing long, looping strands of thick black hair. He trims the dead locks and sells them as extensions...which go nuts and start to kill the women who wear them. These divergent storylines are braided together and come to a head (of hair) in a final showdown between a heroic hairstylist and a hungry hairstyle. Striking a perfect balance between outright parody and skin-prickling terror, with Ren Osugi doing a weird cheer on the sidelines, this movie will finally teach you what it really means to have a bad hair day.

Born in 1961 in Toyokawa City, Sion Sono began his artistic career as a poet, and moved into making 8mm films when he entered university. In 1985, his half-hour short film "Ore wa Sion Sono da!" ("I Am Sion Sono!") was screened in competition at the Pia Film Festival, and two years later his film "Otoko no hanamichi" ("A Man's Hanamichi") won the Grand Prize at the festival. A Pia fellowship allowed Sono to complete his first 16mm feature film, 1990's  Bicycle Sighs , which toured European and Asian film festivals for two years. His second feature film, The Room , won a Special Jury Prize at the Tokyo Sundance Film Festival in 1992. In 1997, after completing several more feature films, Sono returned to his poet roots with the controversial "Tokyo GAGAGA" project, a series of performance art and guerilla poetry gatherings staged at popular public locations throughout the city. In 2002,  Suicide Club , the most successful film of Sono's career to date, played at many film festivals and won a Jury Prize at Montreal's Fantasia, later gaining a domestic home video release from TLA. Sono subsequently wrote a  Suicide Club  side-story novel and contributed to a manga inspired by the film but featuring an entirely different story. Sono came to New York City to shoot the low-budget film Hazard  in 2002, starring a then little-known actor named Joe Odagiri; the film was later released in 2005 following Odagiri's rise to fame. The prolific Sono also completed three other films that saw 2005 release: the puzzle-box thriller Into a Dream  (also starring Odagiri); the semi-sequel to Suicide Club , Noriko's Dinner Table ; and the delirious  ero-guro  tribute Strange Circus . Although Sono comes to NYAFF with one of his biggest studio films to date, the Toei-produced Exte , he is still very much a unique Renaissance man of an artist, not only writing his own screenplays but also creating the music for his films and participating closely in the cinematography and editing.