‘The Blackening’: Review

Dir: Tim Story. US. 2023. 97mins

An expansion of the popular 2018 short film which satirised the unwritten horror movie rule that it is always the Black character who dies first, The Blackening is an uneven but ultimately enjoyable mix of scares and commentary. Director Tim Story references everything from Get Out to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre while mocking both genre conventions and cultural stereotypes, assembling a fun cast of characters who are fighting to stay alive in the midst of grappling with their Blackness in an inherently racist society. Even when the jokes occasionally fall flat, the ideas are killer.

  This is a horror film about how predictable horror films can be.

The Blackening premiered in Midnight Madness at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, and opens in the US on June 16. The picture does not feature huge stars but the fresh premise, which will be appreciated by horror aficionados, could help make this a solid commercial alternative to summer’s bigger blockbusters. 

A group of college mates who have not seen each other in ten years are getting together for Juneteenth by renting a cabin in the woods. There’s some drama among these friends — Lisa (Antoinette Robertson) has quietly got back together with her womanising, on-again/off-again boyfriend Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls) — but the gang’s principal concern is that two of their pals seem to have gone missing. Soon, they encounter a creepy, sentient board game called The Blackening, which asks them Black trivia questions and threatens to kill them if they answer incorrectly. If that wasn’t disturbing enough, there is also a masked stranger hunting them down with a crossbow.

Working from a screenplay by Tracy Oliver and Dewayne Perkins, Story (Think Like A Man, Ride Along) adapts the original four-minute short from comedy troupe 3Peat (which includes Perkins) to craft a knowingly familiar horror template. As with so many films before it, The Blackening places its characters in the middle of nowhere, their unimportant personal issues soon taking a backseat to the psychopath who is stalking them. Throw in cheeky nods to Saw, Scream and The Shining, and it is clear that Story wants us to relish the narrative plundering. This is a horror film about how predictable horror films can be.

Of course, there are also deeper themes at work. If the short merely lampooned the lazy convention of Black characters being killed off early in horror films — an indication of their lesser importance in comparison to the white characters (and the more-famous white actors who played them) — the feature’s satire casts a wider net, using the trope as a springboard to examine racism across the culture. Bi-racial Allison (Grace Byers) feels picked on by her friends because she is “not as Black” as them, while some of the bigger laughs come from the characters getting angry when someone responds to this terrifying situation by behaving like a white person would in a horror film. (Do not even think about suggesting that these friends split up to better their odds of not dying.) But the dark barbs go beyond picking on cinematic tenets, encompassing everything from police brutality to Donald Trump and highlighting all the ways Black Americans feel imperilled in the world. 

Although many will recognise the tropes and flimsy plot twists being spoofed, The Blackening does not always transcend those cliches, sometimes serving as little more than a slightly funnier version of a fairly straightforward horror film. The cast keeps things lively, doing an admirable job of playing the types of not-always-bright characters you see in pictures like this. Perkins is amusing as the flamboyantly gay Dewayne, Lisa’s best friend who is unhappy that she is back with two-timer Nnamdi. X Mayo flaunts major attitude as the no-nonsense Shanika, while Jermaine Fowler makes the unpopular Clifton, who invited himself along to this friends’ getaway, an agreeably hapless nerd. 

The Blackening includes a few jump scares and the occasional kill, but Story is less concerned with gore than generating enough suspense to serve as a counterpoint to the gags. Even at just over 90 minutes, the film feels overextended as it strains to stretch the short’s clever idea into a feature-length narrative. But the breezy tone proves winning, no matter the serious intention underneath. In horror movies, Black characters have to fear for their lives — The Blackening suggests that, in some ways, the same holds true outside the multiplex as well.