BAFTA-winning The Equalizer star Laya DeLeon Hayes is a grieving mad scientist in the new trailer for The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster. The film, which initially premiered at SXSW earlier this year, follows Hayes’s Vicaria, a brilliant teenager hellbent on finding a cure for death. When her brother is brutally gunned down in a sudden act of violence, she takes it upon herself to revive him no matter the dangers that await her. As the trailer shows, he comes back as something far more horrifying than he was in life.
Vicaria is definitely not your normal teen in the footage. Her teachers are worried about her obsession with death, and she has a lab of her own dedicated to finding out how to conquer the omnipresent force once and for all. It’s there that she brings her deceased brother, propping up in a chair to zap him back to life as a modern Frankenstein. Her intentions are noble as she hopes to mend her broken family, but something is clearly wrong when her brother’s body goes missing from the lab. Everything devolves into chaos as family members start noticing him lurking around the home before he finally starts to attack.
The reborn Chris (Edem Atsu-Swanzy) may not be as evil as it seems, however. The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster is billed as equal parts heartbreaking and thrilling, aiming to be a thought-provoking creature feature that challenges notions of life and death. Not everyone is victimized by Chris as he’s perfectly calm around Vicaria in the final scene of the trailer and even makes a friend out of one of the family’s youngest members. He’s only a monster because others see him as an undead being who shouldn’t be alive. Vicaria, too, is judged harshly as just an archetypal mad scientist even though she just wants her family back.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, creator Bomani J. Story detailed how his take on Frankenstein incorporates themes of systemic racism and pressure by showing a loving family facing harassment from the police. Those themes are especially reflected in Chris who the writer/director wanted to use to explore misjudgment and stereotypes. He explained:
Everyone’s judging this creature before he opens his mouth. 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.
When Does The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster Release?
In addition to Hayes, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster stars Denzel Whitaker, Chad L. Coleman, Reilly Brooke Stith, and Keith Holliday. The film is just one of the exciting modernized takes on Mary Shelley‘s classic tale with Guillermo Del Toro‘s starry Frankenstein adaptation finally in the works after so long as well.
The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster releases in theaters, digital, and on-demand on June 9. Check out the trailer below.
