Director Bomani J. Story Discusses His Frankenstein-Inspired Horror Film 'The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster'
Bomani J. Story
It’s not easy to create original horror these days. It’s even harder to make one that pays perfect homage to a certified classic. Still, Bomani J. Story succeeds effortlessly in his contemporary retelling of the Frankenstein story in The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster.
The film, which is in select theaters now and is available on VOD this weekend, follows a teenage girl who has become so desensitized by death in her life that she aims to cure it. Understandably, no one takes her seriously at first. But when she successfully revives the corpse of her dead brother, and he begins to wreak havoc on their gang-infested neighborhood, everything changes.
While it isn’t a completely faithful adaptation to the gothic tale, in an exclusive interview with FilmSpeak, director Story discussed why he felt the need to adapt it as well as what inspired the plot’s biggest changes.
“I always knew I wanted to do something with [Frankenstein],” he said. “I just didn't know what. I locked it in the back of my mind and you know, kept moving and kept learning about cinema and living my life until finally, it came to me.”
Story explained that the true inspiration for the film came from his two older sisters. Growing up, they mentored him and took him under their wings. With this film, not only did he want to embody their strength, he “wanted to really honor them” too. And he believes he does a good job with the film’s headstrong protagonist Vicaria. On top of dealing with a literal monster she’s created, she’s forced to deal with mounting social and systemic pressure.
When the audience first meets her character, she’s struggling to survive in a neighborhood overrun with violence and drugs both controlled by a local gang. To a certain degree, Story says the film is an examination of how those pressures can turn you into a monster even if you don’t give in. “Systemic pressure makes people react a certain way,” he said. “Vicaria’s whole being is a very strong reaction to that pressure.”
Chad L. Coleman
When asked if the reaction to her environment forces her to become the “Angry Black Girl” the title refers to, Story clarified that the title is actually open to interpretation. “It can mean a lot of different things,” he said. He then said that when the film premiered at the Atlanta Film Festival earlier this year, one of the film’s stars, Chad L. Coleman shared a similar interpretation. “When I read it, I always thought it was, you know, what society is putting on her,” Coleman told him. During filming, however, he recalled a moment where one of the film’s female co-stars approached him and asked about the title referring to all of the fed-up Black women in the film.
By then the answer was yes, but only because as he said, the title had come “alive.”
Story confessed that he did not pick the title to be provocative. In fact, he revealed that the title didn’t come until much later in the production process. “After I was done writing the story, the title started speaking to me,” he said. “It was just a weird emotional journey to get to it. And once I started seeing the effects, how it moved in, how it presented the movie, how people were reacting to it, and what it meant to [my cast]. Then it just became its own thing.”
Story still acknowledged that some people might find the title jarring or offensive for how it fuels the racist stereotype of Black people being viewed as “naturally angry,”, but he also added that same conflict would make the film more conversational than controversial. He added that he enjoyed how the title could “rub people the wrong way and also empower [them].”
Now, as good as his contemporary adaptation is, Story makes it clear that he isn’t exclusively a horror director. While he does want to explore other modern themes, he wants to try his hand at other genres in the future. Without going into too much detail, he teases that he’s already working on a fantasy film that he calls “a cross between Lord of the Rings and Juice” He adds that his goal as a filmmaker is to always give the audience “more than what they bargained for.
He adds that a lot of his favorite movies have left him running through a whole spectrum of emotions and he just hopes that his work is good enough to replicate that experience. “I hope that when people walk in this movie, they're able to feel tense, they're able to feel disgusted, they're also able to laugh at certain things, they're also able to feel the drama in the air,” he said.