What began as a smirking punchline traded in the shadows of kitchens and living rooms has long since reached the mainstream. Now everyone knows: in American horror films, you can count on the black character dying first.
This joke forms the basis of the new horror comedy The Blackening (in cinemas June 16), which will be released under the motto “We can’t all die first”. A Juneteenth weekend in a remote, cavernous cabin turns deadly for a group of friends when they discover a board game in the basement. A Sambo figurehead sits in the center of the panel, testing it against various touchstones of black culture: what is the second verse of the black national anthem? How many black actors have guest starred on the TV show Friends? A masked figure emerges from the shadows to reveal the deadly consequences of wrong answers.
The Blackening is based on a Comedy Central sketch of the same name originally developed by comedian Dewayne Perkins, who stars in the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Tracy Oliver (a writer of Girls Trip). In a video interview, Perkins said the concept arose during his time on the Chicago comedy scene.
“All the black people who were in the skits said, ‘Oh yeah, we always feel like we’re individually the most expendable in a lot of the institutions that we’re a part of,'” he said. “So that was the impetus, so to speak. If we lumped all black people together in horror movies, they would have to have a system for determining who will die first.”
In short, a group of black friends confronted by a killer must decide who is “the blackest” – and therefore likely to be killed first. The comedy, of course, lies in what naturally follows: everyone gathered trying to prove that they are the least black. A character chokes for repeatedly trying to insist “All Lives Matter,” the debilitating response to Black Lives Matter. After seeing the sketch, Oliver sought out Perkins to adapt the play into a feature film. (“The Blackening” recreates the short film in one of its funniest scenes.) Initially hired as a producer, Tim Story, best known for “Barbershop” (2002), fell in love with the script and decided to direct it as well. “It’s something I really wanted to bring to screen,” Story said.
Comedian and actress Yvonne Orji, who plays Morgan, was also drawn to the subversive script. “We’re turning stereotypes on their head, and I love it when stereotypes are turned on their head,” she said.
That black characters are given prominence in the horror genre turns on its head a fraught legacy that has often employed them as comic relief or dismissed them out of hand; Perkins explained that it was a conscious decision to play with these archetypes so that the film would be in constant dialogue with this story. “My character is a gay best friend, which is a typical expression. With all these characters, their origin is just a phrase at the beginning,” he said. “Then we use the film to constantly feed that character. And the goal was to make the trope a fully realized character.”
Although primarily a comedy, The Blackening also delivers dynamic moments of suspense and chilling horror, a result of Perkins and Oliver’s enduring admiration for horror cinema. “That was my favorite genre,” Perkins said. “I think that’s why the film is so full of references.”
And references abound. A partial list includes The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Friday the 13th (1980), The Evil Dead (1981) and A Nightmare On Elm Street. . (1984), The People Under the Stairs (1991), Jumanji (1995), Scream (1996) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). “The Blackening” wowed audiences last fall when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. And ahead of its release, it will be screened at the Tribeca Festival, including a June 13 screening at the Apollo Theater.
Story brought his experience directing comedy to the funnier elements of the film, but he found tackling the scarier moments a challenge. “The cool thing about being a movie lover is that you end up actually studying all kinds of these genres,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to explore horror, but I needed to find something that was still in my world.”
The film’s title recalls an idea mentioned in a recently published book, The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema From Fodder to Oscar, by Robin R. Means Coleman and Mark H. Harris. The authors describe the increase in the representation of black films in the late 1960s – or the “blackening”. Above all, both authors share their love for George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), in which the black man is known to die last, albeit doubly tragically: he survives a zombie apocalypse, but is killed by a vigilante mob. Harris credited the film with inspiring what he called his “love of horror” in an interview. Coleman and Harris chronicle these cycles of diversity in their book, which inevitably come to an abrupt end, from the blaxploitation era through the urban horror of the ’90s to this latest, respectable generation of transparently politicized horror.
Though she justified the rise and fall of these past movements, Coleman said, “We’re moving away from what I see as Blacks in Horror to Black Horror, which is truly a reflection of Black life, culture and experiences Coleman, a scholar who also wrote Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films From the 1890s to Present, praised the innovation in recent horror films and cited Nia DaCosta’s Candyman (2021). “There’s art, there’s music, slang, it’s all there.”
As a testament to the genre’s sudden tightening, at least two of the actors in The Blackening can already count salient characteristics of this wave of social justice horror in their work. Sinqua Walls, who plays Nnamdi, recently starred in the Sundance Grand Jury Award-winning film The Nanny (2022), and Saturday Night Live veteran Jay Pharoah, who plays Morgan’s friend Shawn, was in the horror comedy “Bad Hair” (2020). Pharoah said he is excited to be in these genre films because they are so popular.
“It’s going to be a niche of people or that cult fandom that you have no idea who’s been looking at your stuff over and over,” he said. “You can quote anything and you know how to die. It’s just a cool thing to be a part of.”
Filming The Blackening was a joy for Story.
“The great thing about this movie,” he said, “was that it was full of celebration.” I mean, that’s what makes it so fun. We lay the foundation for many great conversations. We want it to represent us and the many facets of us. and invite others to create their version too.”
Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.