Director Benjamin Madgwick collaborates with hairstylist Claire Moore in a disquieting project that tests our comfort levels with hair by placing it in unfamiliar and unusual places. What started as a photography project looking at ways to challenge beauty norms quickly evolved into a film that tips the scale from glorification to revulsion. 

Coming from a stills background, Madgwick captures the fine details of the human form that is often left unexplored in art. The stark silence in the film forces the viewer to focus on the assorted hair that creeps across walls and bathtubs and protrudes from food and crevices. 

Chaetophobia creates a world of tension by transforming the familiar into the peculiar and beauty into repulsion. Hair is no longer seen as an inert and decorative part of the body but a living object with consciousness and unsettling intent.