The fascinating dichotomy of hair is how it may be equally alluring and gross depending on where and whether it is attached to the body. While the hair on our heads is mostly accepted as a beautiful feature, once it migrates down the body or becomes unattached from it completely – discovered in food, stuck within the drain –  what was once sensual can quickly turn into something that agitates and brings discomfort for many individuals.

In Chaetophobia, hair stylist Claire Moore’s latest film with director Benjamin Madgwick which takes the word for the fear of hair as its title, hair is all over the place. Creeping up from beneath trousers, opened up across skin, in mouths, within the soap dish and the sink, filling the bath, slithering up partitions, hidden in a sandwich.

“We wish people to see hair as an object reasonably than a functioning a part of our anatomy,” Moore says of the hair’s at times autonomous movements. “People have a lot emotion attached to their hair and consider it as a serious a part of their identity but, in point of fact, hair is just dead skin cells. I need people to query what hair means to them.”

Filled with eerie, visceral tableaux that walk the road between seductive and repulsive, the experience of the film is heightened by the creaking, cracking, wet sound effects that only add to the unsettling atmosphere.

A hairdresser herself, Moore says she is continuously surrounded by other people’s hair and as such has develop into very comfortable with it but knows that isn’t the case for most individuals, especially when it’s on a girl’s body. “Once I was studying I’d cut people’s hair in my flat to generate income and can be endlessly cleansing hair clippings. It was a component of my on a regular basis life but I considered how this may make most individuals uncomfortable and this idea has at all times stuck with me.”

Watch the film below.