A child of “the projects,” she has grown up immersed in tragedy. Drugs, pan-generational poverty and guns saw to that.

“I heard my Mom’s heart stop beating when I was eight,” Vicaria narrates. “Death is the disease that broke my family.”

Being a sensitive child, she’s become obsessed with the subject. Being a smart kid, she’s resolved to spend her life doing something about it.

And this being a horror movie with sci-fi undertones, electricity and the Frankenstein story are her guide. That’s how she reanimates her “monster.”

“The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster” is a sharp, clever twist on the Frankenstein plot, one with a racial and political edge. The entertaining debut feature of writer-director Bomani J. Story benefits from that edge, some smart casting and a fresh setting for depicting Black disadvantage, the trees and grassy lawns and run-down duplexes of Charlotte, N.C.

That’s where gunshots alarm every resident and flashing blue police and red ambulance lights never arrive in time to help.

As her brother Chris (Edem Atsu-Swanzy) just joined the ranks of shooting victims that also included her Mom, this time teenaged Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes) is going to do something about it.

“Consequences?” What teenager ever worried about those?

Like the best sci-fi on a budget, our writer-director here doesn’t dwell on the “science” of it all.

We see how Vicaria has channeled her obsession, but not a lot of details. She’s “body snatching” the endless supply of fresh corpses her violent, drug-and-gang infested neighborhood supplies. We don’t see how she does that. She’s dissecting and and applying electrical shocks to hearts and body parts. We DO see that. This is a horror movie, after all.

But the power-grid-sapping tech, the scribbled note-taking “discoveries” and advances in her work are covered in montages.

The “PWI Princcess” may interrupt and mouth off in her white high school and earn the nickname “Mad Scientist” from little neighbor girl Jada (Amani Summer). But all “details” about what’s she’s learned and reasoned-out on this subject would do in undercut the story’s credibility and bog down the movie, which is really about something else.

The screenplay has characters debating race, the power structure, racist, heavy-handed policing, “erased” history and unknown Black and/or female pioneers in science.

A curious, opinionated child who won’t stop interrupting her always-gets-her-name-wrong teacher, so “security” is called.

And the neighborhood drug kingpin, given a career-changing charismatic flair by Denzel Whitaker, must have minored in sociology.

“Addiction is an emotional issue, not a ‘substance’ one!”

Chad L. Coleman brings a defeated pain and angry “support my child, no matter what” defiance to his performance as Vicaria’s dad. Reilly Brooke Stith (“Orange is the New Black”) makes an interesting big-sister/role model for Vicaria, playing her dead brother’s smart and very pregnant girlfriend. And Keith Holliday brings the hulking, wild-card menace to the tale that Whitaker’s more calculating kingpin Kang lacks.

But Hayes, a veteran of the Queen Latifah TV series “The Equilizer,” does most of the heavy lifting. Vicaria is numbed to death and loss, until that moment she isn’t. Even seeing the life ebb from a just-shot pesky younger kid she’s been trying to mentor barely brings a tear.

But when it all hits her, we believe it.

Writer-director Story tries to err on the side of not telling us enough. Yet the finale has a metallic clunk to it that is less satisfying than he thinks and less narratively defensible given what’s transpired before.

But put “The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster” on your list of must-see/won’t-be-here-long summer thrillers, crowd-pleasing movie comfort food that embraces an old formula and manages to do something smart, insightful and topically relevent with it.

Because that “Frankenstein” tale is the allegorical gift that keeps on giving.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug abuse context, profanity

Cast: Laya DeLeon Hayes, Denzel Whitaker, Reilly Brooke Stith, Amani Summer, Ellis Hobbs IV, Chad L. Coleman and Keith Holliday

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bomani J. Story. An RLJE/Shudder release.

Running time: 1:31