Why racism is the real horror in Regina Hall's college-set thriller 'Master'

For filmmaker Mariama Diallo, writing "Master," a "spooky drama" about Black women navigating the politics at a tony New England college, was a way of excising the microaggressions and racism she'd suppressed during her undergraduate years at Yale.

"I had some similar experiences to the ones you see in the film and I had a lot to unpack and process from that time," she said. "It was kind of screaming at me to be told."

Her debut feature, which premiered at Sundance and will be available in select theaters and on Prime Video Friday, stars Regina Hall as Professor Gail Bishop, the first Black woman to hold the titular post at Ancaster College, an elite Northeastern institution.

"The master position is one that I lifted from my own experience at Yale," said Diallo. "It's almost like a dean of students, but there are several of them tied to specific residence halls. It was alarmingly normalized to the students in a way that, in retrospect, was almost abusive. You're