The Blackening is a fun new entry to the comedy horror genre which doesn’t deliver enough of each to make it great, but not too little to make it bad. It sits right in the middle of great and bad with a strong good. I enjoyed my time with this one but the lack of conviction to the clichés it relies on sometimes feel like they’re just an easy excuse rather than a real commentary on them. The film was sold as a very self aware story, showing common horror tropes and then subverting them. There are a few notable examples of this in the film, not making it a complete mislead, but falling into these tropes a little too easy in other parts.
The cast of this movie help to bring it to life, bringing so much character to their roles. Nobody in the cast drops the charisma and falls into the background for me.
There isn’t a lot of focus on the depth of the characters relationships in this film but really we’re not missing out on too much emotional context for a comedy slasher which is based on other horror slashers, their surface level tropes and base level characters. These characters have a lot more foresight to them, not blindly walking into the situations like other characters have in previous entries to the genre, but also keeping enough of the template to comedically play with.
We follow the group as they all go to celebrate Juneteenth in a reunion sort of way, renting out a cabin in the woods to play card games and take drugs. On the journey there, we see some sprinklings of racism from a white police officer and a suspicious gas station patron. As we can safely assume, police officers in remote areas are nothing but trustworthy, impartial and diligent in their duties. Along with staring customers in side of the road supermarkets.
The card games take a turn when they find a board game in the aptly sign posted “Games Room”. This board game is a less immediately violent and quite compact take on the Saw game. The Blackening is a game based on racist figures and timed trivia questions on black culture and history. The group take their turn answering the questions to avoid the punishment of a dead friend if they answer wrong or stop playing the game.
After a while, the group revolts and we move into a traditional cat and mouse movie with racist killers chasing down the characters.
The film’s comedy is generally pretty funny, playing on stereotypes and previous traditions set up in horror films. The premise of the film is based on the pretty solid theory that many black characters die first in a horror film. To the point where the first question asked by the game is “Name a black character in a horror film that survives until the end?”.
I would have loved for them to push these further and subvert more of these, in more ridiculous ways. One that I did appreciate is when a door opens by itself, and slowly creaks further and further open. The response is not to investigate like every other horror, instead, they shut the door and move on.
The comedy is not only reliant on these stereotypes though and successfully delivers jokes between characters which are generally funny without much context needed. These kind of jokes are the ones that I feel will stick with me when I think back on this film.
Similarly, the horror doesn’t go far enough for me. This film was rated a 15 in UK cinemas and doesn’t use the horror or slasher elements to its fullest potential. I’m not asking for a full on atmospheric horror, it's not what we want from this. I could do with a bit more slasher in there though, a lot of the violence is shown off screen.
Technically this film is pretty standard, with some nice night time photography, giving the otherwise balanced lighting a bit more interest. I appreciated the moments where the camera paid homage to other horror films with the foreboding shot of the killer walking towards a victim in an over the shoulder shot, or a stalker like shot from the outside, watching the characters interact inside.
The music was also pretty well integrated, with some fun needle drops and atmospheric horror plink plonks sprinkled in around the silence.
Overall, I think this is a really fun idea and another great example of more diverse stories shaking up the film industry we’ve been stagnant in. I think this one had all the right elements but felt afraid to push them to their limits. Pushing them to what they could have been, would have made this one of the best comedies of the year for me. It doesn’t seem like a franchise starter but I would hope that they would continue and expand on the idea. Give me more of it all, now!
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