I Just Saw

I just saw The Blackening and it was good. Based on a comedy sketch, it’s a satirical slasher film starring a black cast of actors playing former college friends who reunite at a cabin in the woods, but not before a couple of them make a rest stop at the proverbial rustic gas station run by menacing locals. The friends are lured to the basement where they find The Blackening, a board game in which counters are moved around a minstrel’s head as per trivia questions related to black identity and culture. It soon becomes clear that someone wants them to play it, and face death for wrong answers…

The film’s tone is pitched somewhere between Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) and the Wayans brothers’ Scary Movie (2000). It’s not as intense or suspenseful as the former and not as anarchic or funny as the latter, taking a more middlebrow road between the two approaches. Some of the jokes are very funny, though, and the characters are sufficiently likeable and well-drawn types, benefitting from a black directing/writing team familiar with the tropes of African American as well as horror cinema.

The performances are good; standouts including co-writer Dewayne Perkins as a gay man (refreshingly well characterised for a slasher film, in that he feels like an actual gay man while also not being a crude stereotype) called Dewayne as well, comedienne X Mayo as bubbly Shanika, and Antoinette Robertson as Lisa, a mixed-race woman who for me had the single funniest joke in the film, about her white father. However, Jeremiah Fowler plays Clifton, a parody of black nerd characters, specifically Urkel from Family Matters and Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He’s a good actor but his character comes with vocal mannerisms that quickly started to grate on me.

The satire is thankfully less preachy than it could have been, and the characterisations less obnoxious. (Clifton aside, although even his habit of talking through the side of his mouth is relatively restrained when you think about what a movie like this could have done with it.) The characters all represent cinematic black archetypes, from player Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls) to reformed gangster King (Melvin Gregg) and Nnmadi’s girlfriend Allison (Grace Byers), who has a history of crying on her gay best friend’s shoulder when he cheats on her.

Here’s a question: How many black characters can you name who DID die first in horror films? It’s a constantly cited cliche (The Blackening’s tagline uses it) yet I honestly can’t think of one. It’s rare for black characters to be the Final Girl, of course, just due to racial disparities in movies generally, but I’m not sure if there are that many who die first. Maybe I’m wrong.

Still, The Blackening is a fun little digestive for horror fanboys, with a whodunnit mystery that’s about as well-plotted and surprising as those in “Golden Age” slashers ever were.

Rating: 3/4