This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labour of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.
It’s hard to believe that The Blackening is an original film. Its concept, as well as its content, is so familiar that it creates a Mandela Effect of another Blackening existing long enough ago to warrant a remake. Somehow, no such film exists. Therefore, it can only be one of two things. The Blackening is either a film that’s long overdue, thoughtfully poking fun at tropes that we’ve all identified and have been longing for someone else to, or it’s just rehashing stuff that everyone else has made a joke about already. Unfortunately, it probably leans toward the latter.
The nucleus of The Blackening‘s narrative is the horror trope that the black character always dies first. As would be expected from a comedy crossover, there are some mildly funny callbacks early on to examples of the trope. The first two characters we meet are Morgan and Shawn, played by Yvonne Orji and Jay Pharoah. Everything they do plays into another trope as they find themselves in a creepy basement with a sentient, racist board game talking to them. It doesn’t take much familiarity with the horror genre to know that they aren’t long for this world. The conversation between them is about Jada Pinkett-Smith and Omar Epps being the first to die in Scream 2, and they wonder whether it might have been down to budgetary constraints than racial bias. It’s enough to raise a slight smile at the strength of Jay Pharoah possibly being in this predicament right now, but that’s about as funny as it ever gets.
The rest of the cast is, deliberately, made up of different black stereotypes. They all come with their own comedy weak points that the others exploit to their fullest potentials, but it’s all stuff that we’ve seen before elsewhere. Grace Byers plays Allison, a mixed-race middle-aged woman struggling with her identity as a black person, just like Tracee Ellis Ross’s character in Black-ish. Jermaine Fowler plays Clifton, a nerdy guy who doesn’t fit in with his more self-assured peers. He isn’t a million miles away from Jamie Foxx’s Electro. Melvin Gregg is King and Sinqua Walls is Nnamdi, two characters who have to have been modelled on the Wayans brothers in Scary Movie.
It shares a lot of connective tissue with Scary Movie, in more ways than just being a horror parody with two Wayansesque characters. Beyond its initial concept, it builds its humour around references and elements of other genre films. The most thoughtful of these is probably a drawn-out sequence where The Saw series is parodied using the racist board game down in the basement. The group are forced to play a game where they’re asked a series of trivia questions on black history in order to save Morgan, who they can see being tortured by video link. The question and answer session has a nice side-effect in spotlighting some elements of history that aren’t usually spoken about in any film, let alone a mainstream one, but there are also some funnier moments where characters try to keep up appearances by feigning ignorance to some of the whiter questions that are asked. This is where the comedic concept of The Blackening comes into fruition – if every character in a horror film is black, then surely the most black has to be the first to die.
The Blackening doesn’t really tell any jokes that haven’t formed part of a stand-up routine already, and because of that, it loses an intensity to its humour. It’s all stuff that’s quite funny, but because we’ve heard it before, it just loses an edge. What it does do very well, though, is it uses the humour derived from the different characters’ roles as stereotypes to build a strong camaraderie between them all. They’re all distinct personalities who have distinct reasons to react to the situation that they’re in the way they do, as well as towards one another. It may not be overtly funny as a horror parody, but it is overtly fun as a hangout movie.
It’s unoriginal, on the nose and it couldn’t ever be accused of any subtlety. That’s why it isn’t very funny. That said, The Blackening does appear to have a lot of thought behind it. It rehashes a bunch of jokes we’ve heard before and it’s derivative of other satirical horror films that already exist, but it brings it all together from a group perspective that’s a pleasure to watch. Although it lacks laugh-out-loud humour and original ideas, it does feel as if it comes from a place of love and respect. Both for the horror genre and for aspects of black culture in general. With that, it’s a good time regardless of whether we’ve seen most of its elements somewhere else.
The Blackening releases in UK cinemas on 23rd August
