Nonetheless, his presence doesn’t seem to greatly concern anyone, because The Blackening is a horror movie that purportedly wants to scare and yet can’t be bothered to hide its obvious twists. Clifton is also imminently forgettable, since he claims to have been invited to this gathering by Morgan, but no one seems to remember or know him. They’re soon joined by Shanika (X Mayo) and Clifton (Jermaine Fowler), the former profane and the latter super-nerdy.
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Shortly thereafter, lawyer Lisa (Antoinette Robertson), her gay best friend Dewayne (Dewayne Perkins) and biracial Allison (Grace Byers) arrive at the cabin, where they’re greeted by former gang member King (Melvin Gregg) and serial Lothario Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls), who’s secretly rekindled his romance with ex Lisa, much to Dewayne’s dismay. The best Shawn can come up with is Jada Pinkett Smith and Omar Epps from Scream 2, and though Morgan correctly informs him that he’s wrong (they both perish), the reference is deliberate, self-consciously foreshadowing the grisly fate in store for the duo. The two are naturally disgusted by this “Sambo,” and even more taken aback by the fact that the face speaks to them, demanding that they pick a card which asks: name one Black character that ever survived a horror film. Their preparations are interrupted by Shawn’s discovery of a creepy game room that’s home to a board game called The Blackening which, at its center, boasts a big racist blackface caricature. All of these individuals are Black, while the only white people in sight are an old codger at a run-down gas station, a scary one-eyed behemoth behind a convenience store counter, and a park ranger named, ahem, White (Diedrich Bader), who makes his presence known by potentially profiling a young Black man for being at the rental residence.īefore any of those prospective Caucasian killers are introduced, The Blackening focuses on Morgan ( Yvonne Orji) and Shawn ( Jay Pharoah), the organizers of this shindig, as they get the cabin ready for their cohorts’ arrival.
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That trend now reaches something of a nadir with The Blackening, a Midnight Madness selection at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival that has a clever hook and next to no clue how to entertainingly execute it.īased on a four-and-a-half-minute 3Peat Comedy sketch of the same name that aired on Comedy Central in 2018, The Blackening revolves around a simple and clever question: If Black people are stereotypically always the first to die in horror films, what would happen if a horror film was populated solely by Black characters? Barbershop and Shaft director Tim Story’s feature adaptation doesn’t overtly posit that query so much as merely attempt to answer it via the story of a group of high school friends meeting at a cabin in the woods on Juneteenth for a 10-year reunion. The problem is, save for Peele’s recent Nope, the majority of those efforts-from Antebellum and Candyman to HBO’s Lovecraft Country and Prime Video’s Them-have been ho-hum at best and reductive at worst, failing to strike a successful balance between gory genre kicks and novel sociopolitical insights.
Jordan Peele’s landmark Get Out has, over the past five years, ushered in a wave of Black horror films and TV series that investigate and exploit modern and historical racial dynamics for monstrous thrills.
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