Sometimes, it’s nice to have a retelling of a story we know and love and that’s exactly what The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster does for audiences. Written and directed by Bomani J. Story, the film focuses on Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes) as she copes with the death of her brother and uses her intelligence to create her own monster of sorts. It is, at its barest form, a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with a young Black woman at the center of the story.
In talking with both Bomanji J. Story and Laya DeLeon Hayes for SXSW’s release of the film, we talked a lot about adapting this story and the inspiration behind it. And for Story, it was centered around his own family as well as reading Shelley’s work.
“It really starts from my home,” he said. “I have two older sisters who were constantly just mentoring me, throughout my life and saying crazy stuff to me and they were really kind of some of my first brush with intelligence and stuff like that. And so then reading the book, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein fresh out of high school, it horrified me and gave me anxiety. And then reading that she basically wrote it when she was like 18 or something like that, off of a whim of a bet you know what I mean? Like, they were just like, ‘who could write the best scary story overnight, you know?'” He said with a laugh, talking about the origin of Shelley’s story.
Story himself went on to talk about his inspiration for the film. “But just like a combination of those things and then the universal themes of the story resonate today to me. I just had to, I had to tell it and reinterpret it in a way that I felt was appropriate and it just didn’t feel like it should go any other way. Obviously there’s other elements too, I want to make sure I pay homage to The Fountain from Aronofski, because he has that line, you know, ‘death is a disease.’ And that was where I wanted to take that and pay homage to him. And that’s where this story kind of brewed and came from.”
You can see our full interview here:
The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster is in theaters now.
(featured image: RLJE Films / Shudder)
