As if the first day of school isn’t fraught enough, the opening scenes of Master find Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee), a Black freshman, getting assigned to a haunted dorm room on the centuries-old campus of fictional Ancaster College. Bad omens abound for Professor Gail Bishop (Regina Hall) as well. Her key doesn’t seem to work in the door of Belleville House, where she has been promoted to the role of residence hall Master.
Writer-director Mariama Diallo’s debut feature turns the chilling experiences of these two Black women navigating a predominantly white academic landscape into a full-fledged horror movie, evoking the paranoia of classics like The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby. As Jasmine and Gail navigate microaggressions, the sense of conspiracy intensifies with whisperings about a witch’s curse that led to a former student’s suicide. To complicate matters, one of Jasmine’s obstacles is another Black professor, Liv Beckman (Amber Gray), who inexplicably gives Jasmine a failing grade on a lit assignment. It’s as if the institution itself is chipping away at the women’s sanity.
Working from her own genre-bending screenplay, Diallo teases the question of whether supernatural forces are at work. Despite glimpses of ghostly figures, the tension of each scene is rooted in the all-too-real strain that Jasmine and Gail endure as their every instinct and motive is questioned by the homogenous culture around them. Regina Hall ensures that even the surreal moments are grounded in reality with her carefully calibrated performance as the titular Master, the first Black woman at Ancaster to hold the prestigious title. The board meetings in which she and her colleague Liv are blatantly tokenized prove just as stomach-churning to watch as the jarring images of maggots infesting her historic house. Diallo deftly employs the vocabulary of horror films, perhaps the most effective way to show the psychological strain of being constantly “othered.”
BAZAAR.com was eager to unpack Master with 34-year-old Diallo, pictured above at the 2022 SXSW Festival premiere of the film. Diallo speaks candidly about the real-world Ivy League experience that inspired her to create this twisty tale of academia’s underside, which lands on Prime Video and opens in select theaters on March 18.
Jasmine Moore (played by Zoe Renee) is an incoming freshman who sees very few other Black students on her campus. She gradually faces nightmares and even hate-crime level harassment. What did her character represent for you? How did she develop in the writing process?
The character of Jasmine is, in many ways, very close to the person who I was when I started college as an undergraduate. But interestingly enough, I was somewhat in denial about that through parts of the writing process. I think that my process in making the film was allowing myself the vulnerability to fully identify with Jasmine and acknowledge the ways in which she, like Gail, is a little bit of a mirror of a part of myself, and that I had been in some of the same situations as Jasmine—though thankfully nothing quite so severe as what she experiences.
The burden of being a “first”—in this case, the first to break through a discrimination barrier—is a common theme between many of the scenes. Can you talk about your efforts to capture the mental toll of that predicament?
When I set out to tell a story that followed Gail and Jasmine and Liv, I had to commit to doing justice to what I know to be true. My mom also worked in academia her whole life, so it’s what I knew to be true from her and from my own friends. This is the burden that a lot of us feel is placed on us. It’s this uncomfortable feeling of both gratitude to have reached some level of attainment that’s been denied to so many people like you, but then also, when you get there, the loneliness and the isolation of being held up as this example.
Gail advises Jasmine from that kind of perspective of maintaining the honor. Like, “Stay in here. You’re the first. This is a privilege to be here.” And that’s a very burdensome message that she passes on. It’s definitely something that’s been told to me, with good intentions, by any number of people. Even without being told that, you feel it yourself. And that’s a very, very heavy mantle to take on.
Even though there are references to a witch and a curse in local campus lore, most of the scenes are rooted entirely in the reality of these women encountering either veiled or direct racial hostility. What was your approach to these moments?
I always considered Master a horror film and I always wanted to create a film that was uneasy and unnerving and scary and spooky. Creating that atmosphere of oppression and loneliness and isolation is something that, when I was writing the script, I tried to really infuse the scenes with. And then when shooting, I tried to not create too much difference between a non-horror scene and a horror scene.
Campus life and academia are home to a lot of real-life racial tension and debate on how history is taught. While you were working on this feature, what headlines were playing out that resonated with your story?
Well, one thing that happened as I was writing the film is that the current undergraduates at Yale—I had already graduated—had a political movement to abolish the use of the term “master” in the school. And the title is no longer used because of their actions. They were also instrumental in renaming a few of the residential colleges.
When I was a student there, there was a residential college called Calhoun College named for [former U.S. Vice President] John C. Calhoun. Within that dining hall, there was beautiful stained glass and one of the stained glass panes depicted slaves carrying bushels. That stained glass was the subject of much debate and back-and-forth between the administration and the students. And then in the end, one of the dining workers went up, at some point, probably at night, with a broom and just broke that window. And that put an end to that conversation, which I thought was a very poetically blunt way to just create some forward movement.
So, there was a lot of political action going on at Yale while I was writing the film, which was inspiring to me. But it also made me interrogate myself on why, when I was a student, none of that was happening. I wasn’t participating in any of those movements.
Who out there is covering some of these same issues that you try to explore in Master?
There are so many people! There’s an author, Percival Everett, whose work I really love. He wrote a book called Erasure that I think contains some of the seething frustration that I felt and expressed in Master about hypocrisy and commodification of Blackness. It’s at times hilarious and painful and fascinating—it’s a wonderful work. A lot of my friends and collaborators on Random Acts of Flyness like Terence Nance and Shaka King, Naima Ramos-Chapman, Nuotama Bodomo…a lot of those creators are making works that really inspire me and are either out in the world or about to come out in the world as well.
When a new generation who discovers this film 20 years from now, how do you hope they’ll see it?
I was thinking about this—how will the film hold up? Although it’s not necessarily what I would want as an artist, I hope that in 20 years, ideally it feels dated because we’ve moved past some of these issues. And that looking back from 20 years in the future, people can think, “Oh, wow, this is what they were going through at that time.” The cynic in me imagines that may not be the case. There are definitely many, many commonalities in my college experience to some of my friends who are older, who went to school in the ’80s and ’90s.
When you have some of these institutions that are several centuries old, part of their selling point is their age and their history and the weight of the institution. And so they’re not skipping gladly into the future. They are very caught up in their traditions, their rituals and their past. I think that there will be a lot of academic institutions that are still circling the drain with these same measures of fake progress that Ancaster gets caught up in.
Is it true that you’re also working on another horror project?
Oh yes, there’s more. There’s more coming.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. We recommend following up the edge-of-your-seat Master with a viewing of Diallo’s 12-minute dark comedy Hair Wolf, which won her the Short Film Jury Award at Sundance in 2018.
Note: This story has been updated since publication.
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Mariama Diallo Hopes Her Film Master Will Feel Dated 20 Years from Now
Source: Filipino Journal Articles
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