The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster trailer introduces a modern reimagining of Frankenstein
Bomani J. Story still remembers his first encounter with Frankenstein. Years ago, soon after graduating high school, the aspiring filmmaker picked up the Barnes & Noble special edition of Mary Shelley's groundbreaking science fiction horror novel. Like so many other people before and since, his mind was blown by the story of Dr. Victor Frankenstein trying to infuse life into dead flesh.
Like Bram Stoker's Dracula, Frankenstein has been adapted hundreds of times over the years, and yet it retains an inspiring power that hasn't dulled with age.
"After I read it, I just knew there was so much here to interpret and adapt that hadn't been tapped," Story tells EW. "I didn't know how I wanted to do it, I just knew that it needed to be done. I knew if I could capture even two percent of the anxiety that Mary Shelley gave me while reading it, then I would be in a very solid place."
After years of working to figure out his own version of Frankenstein, the result is The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster — the trailer for which EW is exclusively debuting below. In Story's debut film, the role of mad scientist belongs to Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes), a young Black girl whose talent for scientific invention meshes uneasily with her firsthand experience of death. After losing her mother and her beloved older brother to gun violence, Vicaria becomes convinced that death is not a natural state of being but a disease. And so she sets out to cure it.
KWPR Laya DeLeon Hayes in 'The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster'
Raised by scientific parents (a dad who worked as a pharmacist and a mom who majored in biology) and mentored by his older sisters, Story put some of his own life experiences into the Frankenstein template. He also proudly calls himself a "Sherlockian," and cites the BBC series Sherlock as an inspiring example of how to take stories from Victorian literature and bring them into the present day.
"My big sisters were my muse," Story says. "A lot of these scenes are just filtered through stuff that my sisters were telling me when I was a kid, stuff that happened to them."
Vicaria's friends and family are surrounded by love but also have to deal with violent intimidation by police. One thing Story says he really wanted to explore from Frankenstein was the way the creature comes to think of himself as a "monster" because that's how other people judge him.
"Everyone's judging this creature before he opens his mouth," Story says. "They're placing these images and preconceptions on him. The true horror of the situation to me is believing what other people call you. It can be something as simple as calling you an 'idiot' or 'stupid.' If you believe that, you're gonna walk through life thinking you're not very smart, and that can alter the course of your life. That's very horrifying, and it has happened to more people than we like to consider. As a Black man, that stuff really spoke to me. It was important to me to try to capture that and deal with it as delicately as I could."
The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster will be in theaters, and available to watch on digital and on-demand, on June 9.
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