“The Blackening” is a slasher movie that’s also a slapdash enjoyable social satire. That the satire turns out to be sharper than the scares isn’t a problem — it’s all part of the film’s slovenly demonic party atmosphere. The set-up, which feels like a “Friday the 13th” sequel by way of “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” reunites nine old college chums to celebrate Juneteenth weekend in a big roomy house they’ve rented near the woods. (Yes, it’s a cabin-in-the-woods movie, but “cabin” doesn’t describe this place.)
As Tina Turner’s cover of “I Can’t Stand the Rain” spins on the turntable, the first two to arrive, Morgan (Yvonne Orji) and Shawn (Jay Pharaoh), find their way to the basem*nt game room, which has shelves of old board games, an ancient TV set, a Ouija board, and a prominently displayed game called The Blackening. Taking the box cover off, they discover, to their horror, that there’s a plastic Sambo head in the middle of the board, which asks questions like “What’s the first Black character to survive a horror movie?” For a few minutes, we’re in the terrain of “Scream” by way of “Get Out.”
Related Stories
The Boyz and IU Set for Tours, While IVE Heads for Lollapalooza Chicago as Kakao Entertainment Seeks Bigger Role in K-Pop
When the others arrive, they go down to the game room, and the television set suddenly pops on. We see one of those ancient this-is-a-test-of-the-emergency-broadcast-system screens with another Sambo face in the middle of it, as “Camptown Races” plays on the banjo, and then the TV image shifts to black-and-white video of what happened to Morgan and Shawn. It’s not a pretty picture. For a moment, we seem to be in the realm of “Saw” — but as soon as we see the killer, hidden behind a bondage mask ascribed with a grotesque blackface caricature, the mood of racist hostility and anxiety begins to conjure, more than ever, a certain sunken place.
Popular on Variety
“Get Out” was a great horror movie and, in its way, a serious one that echoed the deep-dish paranoia of films like “Rosemary’s Baby.” “The Blackening” has no such pretensions. The script, cowritten by Tracy Oliver (“Girls Trip”) and Dewayne Perkins (who plays DeWayne, wide-eyed and fast-talking and gay), is full of dialogue that pops with comical tossed-off self-awareness. “The Blackening” is framed as a thriller, but the way that the veteran director Tim Story (“Barbershop,” “Think Like a Man”) has staged it, the entire movie turns out to be a riff — a highly barbed and witty one — on Black in-jokes, Black pop-culture referentiality, and Blackness itself. This is the sort of movie that pivots around the inside intricacies of the card game Spades, and in which a character looks at Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls), the group’s tall and handsome player, and says, “You are an original African. You’re a still-in-its-original-packaging Black.” Or the Park Ranger shows up and is greeted with the line, “I’ve never been so happy to a see a white savior.”
This is funny-nasty stuff, all delivered in the spirit of characters who reveal themselves, the film implies, in a way they wouldn’t if white people were around. The actors make their presence felt, from Melvin Gregg as King, the arrogant ex-gangsta who feels he’s doing penance by having married a white woman, to Antoinette Robinson and Grace Byers as Lisa and Allison, who carry on conversations so rooted in the intensity of their Black sisterhood that they’re telepathic (a joke that feels like it could have come out of “Scary Movie”), to Jermaine Fowler as Clifton, the group nerd, who with his lopsided gawk and fixation on the superiority of the Android to the iPhone at first strikes us as an innocuous geek, but he turns out to be a geek from hell. There’s a surprise resonance to Fowler’s performance. This is a movie that culminates in the killer asking the group’s members to save themselves by sacrificing the one of them who’s “the Blackest.” But what does that mean? As our cliché definitions start to fall away, we realize that the very notion of being “the Blackest” is a self-destructive power trip.
The terrific ad tagline of “The Blackening” (“We can’t all die first”) is, of course, a reference to a long-standing trope and eye-rolling gripe: that the Black character in a horror film always dies first. But the real joke is how a perception like that one has become part of popular culture. The Blackening game keeps testing the characters’ knowledge of trivia, with brain-teasers like: Name the five Black actors who appeared on “Friends.” By the time they’re trying to answer that one, the movie is getting us to chortle at the bitter irony of it all — that though a renegade pop scholasticism binds these characters as surely at it does the horror geeks of the “Scream” films, in a way it carries more urgency here, since every piece of trivia channels issues of inclusion vs. being on the outside looking in. It’s a tribute to “The Blackening” that it invites everyone in the audience to feel included in its diabolically socially competitive, naughty-clever games.
FAQs
'The Blackening' Review: The Rare Slasher Movie That's Also an Entertaining Social Satire - IMDb. “The Blackening” is a slasher movie that's also a slapdash enjoyable social satire. That the satire turns out to be sharper than the scares isn't a problem — it's all part of the film's slovenly demonic party atmosphere.
What is the movie The Blackening about? ›
What makes a slasher movie a slasher movie? ›
Slasher films are a genre of horror most popular from the late 50s to the early 90s, defined by its use of a generally masked killer harassing and murdering groups of people. The genre and its popular films created many of the tropes we see in horror today, and many franchises have been spawned out of the films.
Why is The Blackening rated R? ›
The MPAA rating has been assigned for “pervasive language, violence and drug use.” The Kids-In-Mind.com evaluation includes a kissing scene, a discussion of infidelity, a man pulling off his clothing to reveal his underwear while dancing, several scenes of people being threatened by a killer, people being shot with ...
Can kids see The Blackening? ›
Overall: 12+ for violence and terror, some grisly images, pervasive language, drug material, and some sexual references.
What is the point of The Blackening? ›
The Blackening tells the story of friends reuniting over the Juneteenth weekend, the US holiday which celebrates the end of slavery. "Growing up there was always the one black person, the token black person that would get killed first," Story says.
Who was the killer in The Blackening? ›
They look through his pockets to see that he is the first killer's twin brother, and they deduce someone hired them to be there. The friends go into another room, where they find Ranger White's and Clifton's bodies, only for the latter to spring awake and reveal himself as the mastermind.
What is the theme of the slasher movies? ›
Built around stalk-and-murder sequences, the films draw upon the audience's feelings of catharsis, recreation, and displacement, as related to sexual pleasure. Paste magazine's definition notes that, "slasher villains are human beings, or were human beings at some point ...
What is the purpose of a slasher? ›
A slasher is an implement with a long sharp blade used to clear scrub. Its long handle, and the open face of its blade, lends it to use for clearing thin and dense low-lying bush or scrub where an axe would be too clumsy. It is similar to a billhook, but with a longer handle.
What is the plot of the slasher movie? ›
In a Violent Nature is a slasher film designed, as most slasher films are, to unsettle and distress. It follows a group of teenagers who unintentionally disturb a grave, awaken a monster, and then get hunted through the woods by this mute, superhuman creature. The plot is stubbornly formulaic.
The Blackening proves to be one of the silliest, smartest and most memorable comedies of 2023. Horror purists might find the picture lacking in genuine scares, but go into it expecting a hang-out comedy with a few jumps rather than a horror movie with a few jokes, and it's unlikely to disappoint.
Is The Blackening a true story? ›
The movie is based on a 2018 sketch that Perkins conceived of as part of the Chicago-based comedy troupe 3Peat. In “3Peat Presents: The Blackening,” a group of friends is forced to decide who among them is the Blackest after an on-the-loose killer is thrown off by the fact that they're all Black.
Is The Blackening a parody? ›
'The Blackening' Is the Best Parody Horror Film Since 'Scary Movie'
What are the cuss words in The Blackening? ›
Parents need to know that The Blackening is a horror comedy about a group of Black friends who have to survive the night against a killer with a deadly board game about Black American culture. Expect violence (peril, killing, torture, blood), much of it racially motivated. There's also swearing ("s--t," "f--k…
Is The Blackening demonic? ›
“The Blackening” is a slasher movie that's also a slapdash enjoyable social satire. That the satire turns out to be sharper than the scares isn't a problem — it's all part of the film's slovenly demonic party atmosphere.
How graphic is The Blackening? ›
A woman's body is dumped in a well. The man is shot with an arrow and is kicked into a well. One of the masked killer gets his head bashed with a candlestick after getting beat up and shot. The bashing is mostly offscreen, but you can see blood splatter and blood on the candlestick.
What true story is The Blackening based on? ›
“The Blackening” is based on a Comedy Central sketch of the same name originally developed by the comedian Dewayne Perkins, who co-stars in the film and wrote the script with Tracy Oliver (a writer of “Girls Trip”). In a video interview, Perkins said the concept came about during his time on the Chicago comedy circuit.
What happens at the end of The Blackening? ›
It does appear that Clifton dies in The Blackening's ending as well, but there is some wiggle room for him to still be alive. He is shot in the chest with an arrow by Shanika during the final confrontation and then Dewayne (Dewayne Perkins) kicks him over a ledge and into the well.
What is The Blackening a parody of? ›
There are nods to plenty of horror films, and horror parodies like “Scary Movie” and its many sequels, but this film is so much smarter than those. It's inspired by films like “Saw,” “The Shining,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and others, which are subtly referenced rather than just reenacted for comic effect.
What is the movie off the black about? ›
