Yahoo News ‘The Blackening’ Tries Like Hell to Parody Horror-Movie Racism
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. 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. 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.
Based 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. 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.
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Before 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. They’re soon joined by Shanika (X Mayo) and Clifton (Jermaine Fowler), the former profane and the latter super-nerdy. 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. 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.
Once together, the crew decides to take a bunch of Molly, drink King’s ultra-sugary spiked Kool-Aid, and play Spades—except, that is, for outcast Clifton, who doesn’t understand the rules and is too lame to convince anyone to teach them to him. Perkins and Tracy Oliver’s script spends an overly generous amount of time establishing these characters, most of which involves unimportant chit-chat about the state of Lisa and Nnamdi’s relationship, and is peppered with barbs about the relative Blackness of each friend. That topic is initially mined for strained one-liners—such as Allison resembling a zebra, because her dad is white—only to become more relevant when the troupe find The Blackening and, after being tested on Black history trivia, are told by the game’s offensive MC that, in order to live, they have to sacrifice the friend who’s most Black.
The ensuing roundabout conversation strives to be telling about Black Americans’ personal racial attitudes, but it primarily results in a bunch of limp jokes that build to an easy slam on Donald Trump. As it turns out, The Blackening is a device employed by a hulking killer in, yes, a demented blackface mask, who stalks his prey while wielding a crossbow and controlling the house’s doors and lights. The fiend is a Jason Voorhees-Michael Myers knock-off with a few Jigsaw-style tricks up his sleeve, and he’s as scary as your average goldfish. He’s also about as dangerous; despite his sharpshooting, the villain turns out to be severely incompetent when it comes to committing actual murder, instead wounding a few targets and getting himself hurt over the course of multiple encounters that are as inelegant and tedious as the material’s stabs at comedy.
Adderall-fueled hallucinations (and superpowers), extended bits about Friends, references to Set It Off and other scattershot gags are strewn throughout this mirthless tale, which would have no reason to exist if it didn’t constantly foreground the issue of race, and yet affords no pointed or amusing commentary on the subject. Story’s slasher saga has a lone idea: imbuing Black characters with (positive and negative) agency. Unfortunately, they’re so one-dimensional and unfunny, and their interpersonal conflicts are so sketchy and beside the point, that it’s impossible to be too invested in their survival. Compounding matters, Story and company have their protagonists mock certain strategic options (“We have to split up!”) as typical white-people idiocy, and then engage in that very same stupid behavior for reasons that make no sense.
The Blackening can’t even stage its action lucidly; the director shoots most of the proceedings in murky shadows that render everything dull and indistinct. Between that gloom and some awful, artificial looking lens flares, the film proves incapable of properly handling light and darkness—fitting, given its equally inept dialogue about race.
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