The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster Review: Death Transforms Her
The New York Times A teenage girl handles her grief in an enterprising way in this horror film from Bomani J. Story.
At the helm of Bomani J. Storys feature directing debut, somewhat deceptively titled The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, is the young Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes), a sharp-witted teenager mired in grief. Routine gun violence has snatched the lives of her mother and Chris, her older brother (Edem Atsu-Swanzy), while her father, Donald (Chad Coleman) woeful collateral recovers from drug addiction in the wake of their deaths.
Vicarias genius inspires the neighborhood kids to christen her mad scientist and later, body snatcher, for she labors under the conviction that death is a disease. In the dim light of a cluttered storage unit, she stoops over her brothers lifeless body sewing bloody flesh together determined to coax him back from the dead.
Fitting that Story should make his first feature a rendition of Mary Shelleys 1818 novel Frankenstein, a famously fluid text that refuses classical genre divisions: It has all at once been deemed science fiction, gothic horror and womens fiction. But Shelleys monster always possessed a racial dimension that only a smattering of scholars have dared to confront. Consider the hardly clandestine, popular imagery of the Black Other lurking in the monsters description: his staggering frame, destructive strength, and the ever-present threat of sexual deviance. Predictably perhaps; the novel arrived in the throes of the antislavery debate, after the nominal end of the international slave trade and amid ongoing revolts in the United States and the Caribbean.
