TIFF
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.
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.