The Angry Black Girl & Her Monster

This film shows you why children shouldn’t play with dead things.

By Tracie Reddick

While I was playing around with the idea of writing a coming-of-age, horror film featuring black kids, Bomani J. Story went out and did the dog-gone thing.

I’m jealous — but, equally proud of his movie: The Angry Black Girl & Her Monster (2023).

And a little pissed at the unenlightened comments calling it a ghettolized version of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein.

Why not call it what it is: A “reimagining” of the classic horror story.

Isn’t that how the revamped movies of mainstream directors are labelled when they put a unique spin on a definitive movie or book?

Plus, there’s already an urban reboot of Shelley’s work dubbed, Blackenstein (1973) and The Angry Black Girl & Her Monster ain’t nothing like that.

It’s a much more compelling update, doing justice to Shelley’s tale about a doomed scientist and his reanimated monster.

Story’s carefully, crafted film has the social relevancy of The Hate U Give (2018) and the cultural fear factor of Tales From the Hood (1995).

In other words, it’s a black thing that some folks refuse to understand.

That being said, let me tell you why I absolutely loved Story’s depiction featuring Vicaria (Laya Deleon Hayes) as a gifted teen who is tired of losing loved ones to gun violence.

Believing death is a disease, the budding scientist vows to find the answer to the cure.

It’s an obssession that earns her a mad scientist nickname and a preoccupation with death that her teacher, Ms. Kempe (Beth Felice), dismisses as nonsense rather than choosing to explore Vicaria’s theory.

When Vicaria refuses to drop her idea, Kempe calls a school resource officer to the classroom to remove her.

He man handles Vicaria to the floor, breaking her glasses during the scuffle.

It’s a poignant moment symbolizing a cracked educational system that degrades the mindset of black students, pushing them out of the classroom and into a path to prison.

During the rest of the film, Vicaria wears the taped glasses, viewing the world through one shattered lens and the other unbroken one, highlighting the duality of her life.

It’s also a double existence faced by the drug dealers who are the monster metaphors in this movie exploring how inner-city children process the trauma stemming from their violent surroundings.

In the opening scene, we witness Vicaria’s mother dying in her arms after she’s struck by a stray bullet.

Fast forward a few years later and we watch as gang bangers shoot her brother, Chris (Edem Atsu-Swantzy), who falls to the ground, arms stretched out in a heavenly pose.

In the next frame, a mural depicts a juxtaposed image of the stereotypical black man raising his arms in a don’t shoot gesture.

Then Vicaria stumbles upon Chris’ body, dragging him to her labratory, which is an abandoned storage unit located in the public housing compex where she resides.

It seems a bit problematic — until you realize a disappearing corpse isn’t that unusual considering missing poor people rarely capture the public’s attention.

Plus, it’s easy to blame it on a black guy and police don’t hesitate to single out the usual suspects: Kango (Denzel Whitaker), the local drug kingpin, and his henchman, Jamal (Keith Holliday).

Residents think other wise, spreading rumors about a body snatcher in their midst.

Vicaria is the least likely culprit, making it easy for her to steal corpses, stitching body parts to Chris’ rotting flesh, turning him into a hideous creature while failing to revive him.

She discovers the method to her madness while watching paramedic’s briefly revive her dead friend, Jerome (Ellis Hobbs IV), with an electrical charge to his chest after he was shot.

Vicaria rigs a concoction to an electrical sub-station powering the complex, sending bolts whizzing toward the jumper cables attached to Chris’ body, jolting him back to life.

He rises, face shielded by a hoodie, morphed into a distorted version of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) as he becomes a poster child for endangered black males stripped of their identities.

Question is: How do you reacclimate the unleashed beast back into society?

Sociologists haven’t even figured out the remedy to this problem mirroring recidivism.

It doesn’t take long for Chris to reoffend, killing folks through strangulation, an act representing the choke-hold that keeps black men locked into a life of crime and called monsters.

Society creates black Boogeymen through these long held beliefs that eventually sink into the subconscious of criminals. Therefore, it should come as no surprise when they live up to their animalistic expectations.

There’s a lot of symbolism in this film that includes:

• Doors, whether being locked, slammed or banged upon, they show how folks feel shut out, trapped in, or, when necessary, feel the need to kick down to get their desired results.
• Breathing, whether its snoring, heaving, exhaling or inhaling, represents how air, a necessity for life, is taken for granted. But, in the hood, your final breath can be taken away in an instant.
• All of the black males in this movie die in the same way, arms outstretched, revealing them as fallen angels — like Lucifer, their common devilish moniker.
• Bandanas are placed at the crime scene like roadside memorials, providing a constant reminder of death.
• Electricity represents power — or the lack of it — and the extremes folks are willing to go through to obtain it.
• The hammer is an Easter egg harkening back to Chad Coleman’s role as Tyreese on The Walking Dead.
• In the final showdown, Kango wears a shirt with the scarlet letters, Hell Raiser, a reminder of the trio’s roles of taking and giving life, all of which comes with a wrath that must be paid when you play God.

Overall, this film is, well, electrifying, providing a much needed focus on family and education.

Only criticism I have of it is the title since angry black girl is a negative connotation used to silence women of color who aren’t afraid to speak their minds.

Meanwhile, we all know about George Washington Carver and his peanut inventions. This movie introduces lesser known black scientists such as, Valerie Thomas, a physicist who invented a 3-D, illusion transmitter and Alice H. Parker, the creator of the gas furnace.

He’s not mentioned by name, but, kids squirt water guns thoughout the film, an invention by Lonnie Johnson, a black guy who is the mastermind behind the Super Soaker.

Another thing I liked about this film is its emphasis on black girls, who typically take a back seat to the plight of boys although they are raised in the same environment and are exposed to the same criminal elements.

Story assembled a cast that’s both talented and relatable, making you go, yeah, I know him or hey, that’s my girl! And it takes you back in the day, when we sported big, bamboo ear rings and went around sucking on ring pops.

I thought lil mama Jada (Amani Summer) was amazing and Coleman’s fatherly performance was as riveting as the role of Furious (Laurence Fishburne) in Boyz in the Hood (1991).

And of course, Hayes (Vicaria) was astounding, especially with the interaction with her other monsters: Kango (Whitaker), the astute, chess playing cargiver, and his machete touting henchman, Jamal (Holliday).

They provided a yin yang complexity that showed Kango’s good, redeeming qualities while Jamal was straight-up evil, literally dying by the sword.

In the final moments, Vicaria realizes she can’t cheat death and must destroy Chris, whose anguished cry is something I hadn’t felt since the last scene in The Mist (1995), where the father is forced to shoot his son.

Like I said, it’s not a remake but a very distinct version of Frankenstein, with only a few references to the book or the 1931 film.

Examples include Vicaria’s notebook dubbed, The Modern Prometheus, which is the subtitle of Shelley’s book that’s based on a myth that warns people about playing God.

And in a well played move, Story didn’t use the iconic catch phrase, It’s alive!, after Chris was revived.

Instead, he waited until the end of the film, during the resurrection of Aisha (Reilly Brooke Stith), Chris’ pregant girlfriend, who touches her belly, waiting for their unborn child — appropriately named Victor — to move.

That’s when she gleefully exclaims: He’s alive!

In that regard, I guess Tony Todd’s undertaker character in Final Destination 2 (2003) was right, only new life can cheat death.

Bravo Bomani!

Again, this is not a remake of the century-old tale, but a reimagining of the story.

You can check out The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster on Shudder or Allblk.