Wade Newhouse
If you have the time, perhaps the best way to prepare for Tim Story’s new horror-comedy The Blackening is to watch the Shudder documentary Horror Noire (2019), which provides a sometimes-scholarly, anecdotal summary of horror movies through the lens of Black America. That film, with its analysis of such disparate Black horror tropes as “the Magical Negro,” “the Sacrificial Negro,” and the White Savior figure, provides the cultural vocabulary that Story’s film both embraces and stomps all over.
The Blackening gives us a group of Black friends reuniting some ten years after college for a Juneteenth weekend getaway in a recognizably-ominous cabin in the woods. The first clue that we are in smart company is that these characters know to avoid such a setting: they nervously call it a ‘cabin in the woods,’ and once they realize that the entire weekend is a ploy set up by a crazed masked killer to off them in creative ways, they immediately attend to the rules established by the genre in their efforts to survive. From the beginning, then, we are a horror meta-verse with appropriate homage paid to films such as Scream and The Cabin in the Woods, films that assume the viewer knows the structures, patterns, and character arcs that defined the slasher boom of the 1970s and ’80s, as well as more modern variations such as the home invasion genre and the Saw franchise.
The Blackening, however, is a comedy about Black horror: how Black characters are treated by the genre, the societal assumptions that govern Black behavior in these films, and how Black audiences react to them. The film’s title refers to an ominous board game that the heroes discover in the cabin’s disquieting Game Room: ostensibly a trivia game in which answering questions correctly leads to advancement around the board and, hopefully, escape from the killer, The Blackening’s board is centered with an offensive Little Black Sambo face that hides a speaker through which the killer taunts them and gives instructions. The questions the potential victims are tasked with answering are all attempts to judge not their knowledge of scary movies (as per the iconic opening scene of Scream) but their awareness of themselves as Black Americans—eventually the real challenge is to determine which among them is “the Blackest” and offer that one up as a sacrifice to save the others.
The script, by Tracy Oliver and Dewayne Perkins, is largely a 96-minute run of jokes about the intersection of horror cliches and Black culture stereotypes—a typical gag is the moment when two characters pause to wonder if they can swim to escape the killer—but there is a gentle social commentary on horror and contemporary American society always lurking under the surface, and some of it has some real bite. The cast, all of whom demonstrate great comic timing setting up and then hitting the jokes, each get a few moments to express their character’s unique place in Black culture, since the rules of the killer’s game force them to evaluate what it means to be Black and how their own stereotypes work within the larger racial stressors in America. Even before the killer shows up, Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls) and King (Melvin Gregg) debate whether Nnamdi can ever move on from being an immature womanizer and whether a Black man married to a White woman makes King “a slave to the White man”; Shanika is accused of being “the Blackest” because she uses the n-word more than the rest of them; and Clifton (Jermaine Fowler) insists he can’t be the Blackest because he voted for Trump.
The Blackening elevates itself beyond these kinds of easy jokes when it reminds us that the killer’s silly game plays on real anxieties that are growing more prevalent in post-Obama America. The requisite closed-circuit camera feed showing one of the victims tied to a chair awaiting her death or rescue appears on a black-and-white television that plays scratchy minstrel show music, while the Little Black Sambo face that one character suggests “probably runs on racism” is a taunting reminder that contemporary Black identity is grounded in stereotypes more hateful and violent than the virgin/slut/jock paradigm necessary for teen slashers. The movie’s best jokes, such as the question of whether Black victims can trust the cops to save them from the killer, come from an awareness that horror and comedy both reflect actual lived anxiety. As Horror Noire announces in its opening introduction to the genre, “Black History is Black horror,” and the revelation of a Confederate flag in the masked killer’s torture basement reminds us that submerged racist violence is rising to the surface of American life more quickly and openly than White America might like to admit.
The Blackening ultimately works better as a comedy than as a horror movie: the few jump scares are really jump-laughs, the violence is more funny than scary, and the sly references to Get Out and Us are clever but don’t add tension. The final act starts to drag and the whole film could benefit from losing five or ten minutes along the way. Horror fans will enjoy counting up the genre tropes, though, and anyone who cares about representation in horror should appreciate the care with which Story, Oliver, and Perkins have put together a film that gently raises real questions about what horror can and should do in an often polarized American society.
