In “The Blackening,” a new horror comedy film released in theaters on June 16th, a group of Black friends goes on a Juneteenth weekend getaway to a remote cabin. However, things take a deadly turn when they discover a board game in the basement that tests their knowledge of various touchstones of Black culture. The consequences for wrong answers are lethal, with a masked figure emerging from the shadows to exact punishment on the players.
The film is based on a Comedy Central sketch originally developed by comedian Dewayne Perkins, who co-stars in the movie and wrote the script alongside Tracy Oliver. The sketch satirizes the fact that Black characters in American horror movies are often the first to die. In the short version of “The Blackening,” a group of Black friends must decide who is “the Blackest” and, therefore, most likely to be killed first by a killer.
In the film, Perkins and Oliver subvert the typical horror movie tropes by foregrounding Black characters, upending a fraught legacy that has often deployed them as comic relief or unceremoniously dispensed with them. The characters in the movie are created from and play with various horror movie tropes, such as the Gay Best Friend.
Although primarily a comedy, the film also delivers dynamic moments of suspense and chilling scares, owing to Perkins and Oliver’s admiration of horror cinema. The film references various classic horror movies, including “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” “The Evil Dead,” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”
The rise and fall of past movements of Black cinema in horror movies is well-documented in the book “The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema From Fodder to Oscar” by Robin R. Means Coleman and Mark H. Harris. The authors described the increase in Black cinema representation in the late 1960s as the “Blackening.” Now, Coleman said, we are moving from “Blacks in Horror” to “Black Horror,” which is a reflection of Black life and culture and experience. Recent horror films, including Nia DaCosta’s “Candyman” (2021), celebrate art, music, and the vernacular, showcasing their pieces of Black culture.
