THE ANGRY BLACK GIRL AND HER MONSTER
I love writer-director Bomani J. Story’s feature debut, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster. I love it for its verve, its intimidating intelligence, its righteousness. It’s one of the few Frankenstein adaptations that actually takes Mary Shelley’s presence in the novel into consideration, serving as a very fine horror film on the one side and a sharp social commentary on the other. Story is the rare young filmmaker unafraid of subtext, and he has a genuine humility about him that, to me, is a predictor of future life success. He’s said that going back to Frankenstein the book was, essentially, a bolt of lightning for him, and indeed, I think it takes a minority read of it to fully grasp its revolutionary quality. I was similarly galvanized my first time reading it, too. It probably, by itself, led to my interest in studying British Romanticism once upon a time.
I talked with Mr. Story over Zoom recently. This is an interview I actively sought out after seeing his film at the Boston Underground Film Festival back in March. He’s young and quick with a laugh, agile and unguarded. I felt lucky to catch him here, right at the start of the rest of his career. We began by talking about the book:
BOMANI J. STORY: After I read it for the first time, I realized how much material is left on the floor when it comes time to interpret and adapt, and I wanted to reclaim that and, in doing that, recontextualize a little bit of Mary Shelley back into the text. I wanted to pay respect to her by making the creator in my piece a young woman, swapping the gender of Dr. Frankensetin and placing the character back in terms of age to the moment of a person’s social awakening. I just wanted to look at the literariness, the richness of it, and to find ways to evoke that cinematically somehow. That was what was most crucial to me[,] this idea of bringing Shelley’s social themes to the forefront–again, you know, hopefully in a… In a fresh and unique way. (laughs) When that novel first came out, these themes were groundbreaking, relevant. I wanted to honour that.
FILM FREAK CENTRAL: What are the themes in Frankenstein?
I think there are a lot of things going on at the same time in there. It’s obviously a monster movie, right, with questions of what makes a monster, who is really the Monster, and how society can create a monster–which then leads to the question of prejudice, which then opens up a broader, and shockingly impactful, sociological read. On a personal level, when I was reading it, I was moved by the hand Victor is dealt. Just even from the beginning, where his mom dies when he’s very young and he has a dark, troubled upbringing, I don’t see how you wouldn’t become fascinated with death.
Thanatopsis.
Yes–that to me just felt really relevant. It’s that relevance I wanted to explore. I wanted to draw it together with the things that go on in the news today in our communities. Talk about a work that really spoke to me. I felt like it was time to do those bits.
It feels too often like new versions of Frankenstein are adaptations of the James Whale film and not the Shelley novel.
I remember when I was reading the book, there were certain things, like Victor getting wrongfully imprisoned for murders that he didn’t commit, that felt so…true. A harsh criminal justice system, no forgiveness, presumption of guilt… My people are treated that way. The Monster, because of his appearance, his parentage and birth: before he even opens his mouth, everything about him is determined. And what does it do to a person when this is the presumption? What happens to a person who’s abandoned and without safety nets? Those threads in there are what I wanted to touch on almost more than the sensational stuff. How could you read this book and not be outraged by how we accept so much of the same injustices as normal? The harsh treatment, these systems designed to keep us down, how does it not make you mad? I was inspired. I really wanted to take a look at this novel as rebellion.
I’m sure you know, but Mary and Percy Shelley didn’t eat sugar because of the Caribbean slave trade. They were abolitionists, and early reads of the book were a lot smarter about that. The first stage versions of Frankenstein even had the Monster in blackface.
I didn’t know that, but it tracks. That’s crazy.
There’s a passage from the book where the Monster awakes: “I heard of the division of property of immense wealth and squalid poverty of ranked dissent and noble blood.”
I wanted to occupy these places in the, I don’t wanna call ’em “in the shadows,” but just spaces where people are overlooked and not treated properly, and where resources are garnished, stolen. I think about these things. You have to–I’m looking for my words here, carefully–I just think we need a hard reckoning with how people are treated, how their humanity is robbed from them, the circumstances that have brought us here. It feels insurmountable, but change is inevitable. And I wanted to do all of that in a sensitive way.
(laughs) Fuck sensitivity.
(laughs) No, seriously, people are hurting.
“If I’m going to try to tell a story about my people, I want to tell a story of hope.”
The year Frankenstein was published, Frederick Douglass was born into slavery. In his autobiography, he says that the more that he read, the more he was able to “abhor, to detest” his enslavers. He talks about finding a satchel of books that radicalized him. The Monster in Frankenstein does the same thing. Education is so often a key in slave narratives.
A thousand percent. That was a big thing to me. What is the creature learning? What books is he reading? What if it was The Autobiography of Malcolm X? There’s a mirror there. Even in Malcolm X’s journey, he has an enlightenment period where he starts to read and become educated, you know, when he’s in a prison cell. I felt that. My creature reading that story, making that connection, was very important to me. I wanted to reflect that element of awakening within the entire family’s household. I think it’s safe to say our history is under attack right now, so it was crucial to shine a light on those elements that would suppress the means for us to know how we got here and how the same people are always trying to keep us from knowledge. But more than just a thematic situation, I wanted to find the emotional, familial situation that is an offshoot of education. These were things that were just being talked about in my household as I was growing up. When I was young, I would go to school and I would be taught one thing and then as soon as I come home, you know, my, my sisters [and I] would unlearn the things that were not right.
Deprogramming.
(laughs) Yes. Basically. That was crucial to really get the scope of the concept of how our stories are the responsibility of our communities: the family, whatever form a family takes. I mean, to me, I think names are your identity. That’s really the first thing that your parents give you. Or the first thing you give yourself when you discover who you are. The naming is crucial, and it’s meaningful to me that the Monster in the book doesn’t have one. Or that Malcolm gave himself the “X,” taking the name back from the Masters. Knowing who you are, your history and where you come from can help ground you. It can give you some kind of stance. Without a name or without history, without understanding yourself, you’re unanchored. Having a name that you own is… It’s the beginning, the entry for a lot of other moments of self-knowledge. To understand yourself and your place in the world, it starts with the name–but that’s just the rabbit hole that leads to a universe of subtext.
What were your radicalizing texts?
It goes without saying The Autobiography of Malcolm X is one. That was a crazy book. Another piece of literature I loved was Moby Dick. What a beautiful book. Incredible. And just to be on the soapbox, everyone always thinks that’s a revenge book, but it isn’t–it’s a coming-of-age story. Okay? Yes, sir. The first line is, “Call me Ishmael.” And Frankenstein. It had such a huge impact on me for any number of reasons but specifically because it taught me the things you can accomplish with a story. I love it, too, because it’s three stories in one. There’s a construction story, the making of the creature, science gone wrong. There’s an atmospheric tale, a gothic almost-romance. And then there’s the revenge plot. She, Shelley, accomplishes so much in both style and substance.
How do you evoke that multiplicity and depth?
[Sound Designer] Grant [Meuers] and I talked about that a lot: the sound, the music. I wanted an atmosphere that was as complex as the things that inspired this story. I wanted to avoid, too, how you know how when a lot of horror movies come out you kind of know what they’re going to sound like. There’s gonna be strings and you’re gonna get the piano sting and all that kind of shit. Working with Grant, we wanted to make sure you can’t sonically figure this film out immediately. I wanted a broad palette–paint the atmosphere, not tell the story. I needed the movie to work in a lot of different modes. There’s the suspense, but there’s also laughter. There’s tragedy. I want to be able to capture all those things. I don’t want it to just be a stress bubble. I want the audience to be on a ride where they don’t know where we’re going.
And I also don’t want music there just for the sake of music. That can be annoying. I kept telling Grant the template was David Lynch. Imagine this crawl in the back of your head. Imagine something under your skin. I remember watching Inland Empire and realizing all of a sudden that Lynch had been holding our hand this whole time, and there’s a moment where he lets your hand go and you freefall. It’s horrifying, but it’s also just, like, so beautiful at the same time. He breaks your trust, and you can’t put your finger ever on why you feel like you do. I wanted that in the sound design, because that’s how I felt reading Shelley the first time.
Frankenstein’s essentially another “coming-of-age” story, right? Like Moby Dick?
I mean, there’s a lot. The main one, one of the main stories of Frankenstein, though, is the coming-of-age story. A whole section of it is told through his point of view–the Monster’s point of view, and the Monster is essentially a baby, learning about cruelty and inequity for the first time.
Mary Shelley lost several children. Four. Her first baby died right before she wrote Frankenstein. She was 18 years old. She wrote in her journal: “Dream that my little baby came to life again, that had only been cold and that we rubbed it before the fire and up lived. Awake and find no baby.” Tell me about grief in your film.
I definitely think a lot of people read Victor as someone who’s going against God and what happens is punishment for his hubris–“The Modern Prometheus,” you know what I mean? And yes, sure, that’s the obvious, literal interpretation, but I also think Mary Shelley’s grief is the thing that unifies all the parts of the story. Victor is grieving, he lost his mother, his family’s breaking apart throughout this book. He’s in a state of grief, and it manifests itself in the flesh. For me, with this movie, it’s like Vicaria is grieving too, you know? She lost her mother, she lost her brother, her father is hanging on by a thread. And the way that she’s able to combat this grief, to make sense of something that, you know, makes no sense, was through her compartmentalizing it with science, with her intelligence. Her commitment to [curing] death is a positive reaction to trauma.
She becomes radicalized.
Absolutely. This is her dealing with her grief. And it’s only along the way that she learns all the other reasons she has to rage.
Your film is hopeful, though, for all that.
I think hope is important. One of the guys who I looked up to heavily as I grew up is Tupac. My sister gave me a Tupac tape and I wore it out. I remember in his interviews, some of the things he would say when he was asked what’s the mark of a good artist, and he was just, like, “Well, you have to talk about the grief and the pain because you can’t just go around glorifying like violence and shit.” Essentially, everything comes with a cost, and you either feed the dark or you work towards the light. His intelligence as an artist, his ethics of art, I don’t think it’s right to start in grief if you don’t intend to show hope. What the fuck is the point of all this if there isn’t a positive way out of it? Everybody just should kill themselves, right?
I do think the book provides a level of catharsis, too, even if it’s pretty nihilistic there at the end. Like, if you believe Victor has offended nature, nature has its victory. But I just… It just didn’t make sense to me like that, so I went the other way. If I’m going to try to tell a story about my people, I want to tell a story of hope. It’s easy and obvious to harp on just the negatives. There are so many negatives, how can you not? But I also understand the importance of celebrating wins. Even if the wins are only [Pyrrhic], we’re still here and we are still thriving and surviving–and in a world stacked like it is, that, by itself, our presence here and our voices raised, is a testament of hope. If you didn’t have that, then there would be no attraction to survival. I was tortured about how to end it, you know? You never know how things are gonna play out–but I just knew it had to end with the strength of the family being the thing that can save all of us.
The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster opens June 9.
