TIFF ’22 Review: ‘The Blackening’ breathes new life into meta-horror
‘The Blackening’ is a slasher comedy, featuring an all-Black cast that refuses to follow established horror movie rules.
Horror is such a malleable genre. It can pair with almost any other category, particularly comedy. It can be used to scare, provoke thoughtful discourse or both. The monsters can be purely fiction or real-life terrors. The would-be victims or survivors can be anyone deemed fitting of the narrative, whether the perpetrator targets people that fit a specific criteria or chooses them indiscriminately. They can be set anywhere, natural or manmade or some combination of the two. In The Blackening, a group of friends on a weekend getaway suddenly find they are being hunted by a masked killer.
A group of university friends (Antoinette Robertson, Dewayne Perkins, Grace Byers, Jay Pharoah, Jermaine Fowler, Melvin Gregg, Sinqua Walls, X Mayo and Yvonne Orji) rent a luxury cabin in the woods to hold a Juneteenth reunion. They haven’t really lost touch, but it’s been a while since they all gathered together. The house is huge and even includes a game room. However, “The Blackening” is a game they wish they’d never found. The little black-faced speaker at its centre knows their names and can hear their conversations, judging the accuracy of their answers to its trivia cards meant to test their “blackness.” Wrong answers result in death at the hands of a crossbow-wielding assassin. So, they try to fend off their drug-induced euphoria and fight to survive a game they can’t win.
In the tradition of Scream and Scary Movie, this slasher picture sets out to turn the horror rules and tropes on their head, as well as challenge and play with racial stereotypes. With an all-Black cast, they immediately address the issue of coloured characters dying first and never making it to the end by making both inevitable. Moreover, they regularly make references to the stupid decisions white characters make in horror pictures, such as splitting up or checking a noise. Alternatively, they all arm themselves with whatever they can find and don’t drop their weapons at the first sign of relief or fright.
The question of blackness is at the narrative’s centre, even before the game forces them to measure it. One character is biracial with lighter skin than her friends, which is mocked regularly. Another character was a former gang member and is, therefore, assumed to carry a gun, while another has no idea how to shoot one. The N-word is used casually and colloquially throughout, yet calling someone a b!tch is considered crossing the line. They also have interesting interactions with a local park ranger (Diedrich Bader), which ranges from racial profiling to allyship. The potentially lethal trivia questions similarly interrogate their knowledge of Black culture, as if not knowing the definition of the NAACP or every verse of the “Black National Anthem” could have your “Black card” revoked. However, voting for Trump unites them all against one of the characters, even more so than any of his other “non-Black” attributes.
It’s not the most unpredictable horror movie, but it makes up for that by being incredibly entertaining and intensely thrilling. Though they frequently break the tension with humour, that doesn’t make hiding from the killer or avoiding their attacks any less scary. Moreover, the characters all have distinctly engaging personalities. To that end, the cast’s chemistry and timing is spot-on, keeping audiences engaged from start to finish, with the conclusion overlapping with some of the end credits.
The Blackening had its world premiere in the Midnight Madness programme at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Read other reviews from the festival.
Director: Tim Story
Starring: Antoinette Robertson, Dewayne Perkins and Sinqua Walls
