The Blackening puts the humour back into horror

13:49The Blackening offers a new spin on the horror genre

The Blackening is a new horror-comedy that follows a group of college friends as they reunite for a summer weekend getaway to a cabin in the woods. As anyone who's watched horror will tell you, that summary alone spells a recipe for disaster.

Culture critics Sarah-Tai Black and Ian Steaman review the film, including the ways it pays homage to the horror genre while also challenging historic tropes around Black characters.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Ian, I'll start with you. What is the premise of The Blackening?

Ian: It's actually probably more like Scream 2 than you realize. But the premise of the film is, it's a group of Black college friends who organize a reunion, get together at a cabin in the woods — so you already know where this is going — and they're doing that over the Juneteenth holiday weekend, only to find themselves trapped in the cabin and forced to play a game called The Blackening (of the title), which tests their Black knowledge and their Black identity. And … they have to give up the person as a victim who they deem to be the most Black.

Elamin: Just that as a premise? Fantastic. I'm sold. I'm already in. Sarah-Tai, was it a home run for you?

Sarah-Tai: It wasn't a home run, but I enjoyed it. I really like the writing. I wish the directing was up to par with it. I think [director] Tim Story is someone who gets good writers and doesn't necessarily meet them where the writing is, but it's really funny. I watched it twice; I laughed just as much the second time watching as I did the first. It's super silly. It's slapstick. It's more comedy than it is horror. Like Ian said, it's actually more like Scream 2. I would say between Scream 2 and Scary Movie is where The Blackening lives.

WATCH | Official trailer for The Blackening:

The thing about me is I'm a silly, goofy guy and I love a silly, goofy movie. And that's exactly what The Blackening is. The writer, Dewayne Perkins, he's around the same age as I am. We're both queer. We both obviously love the same kind of horror movies growing up. So this kind of homage that he's doing to films like Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer, it's definitely working on me in that sense, too. And the stakes are so low, you know? It's nice sometimes just to have a laugh and not be reminded of the terrible anti-Blackness of the world. I think there's a place for Black filmmaking of all kinds, including stuff like The Blackening — which is a little bit inconsequential, but it's fun.

Elamin: I'm interested in the distinction you drew, because this was originally for Dewayne Perkins' sketch comedy troupe; they sort of had a much shorter sketch. Did the idea of taking that sketch and making it into a full-blown movie work for you?

Sarah-Tai: I think it still has potential. Like I said, I don't think Tim Story really stepped up to the plate. I don't know if he's someone who can do that sharpness of comedy alongside specifically horror, you know? … But for me, I'm all about the writing. Like, it's so rare to make me laugh. I'll take whatever I can get.

WATCH | Official clip from The Blackening:

Elamin: Ian, what about you? What do you think of the movie?

Ian: I guess I'm not a million miles from where Sarah-Tai is on it. I actually did end up watching it twice as well, and I enjoyed it both times. But it's billed as a horror-comedy, and it leans a little bit more on the comedy side of things than it does the horror. There's some pretty visceral and physical and violent scenes, but there's not a lot in the way of actual scares — and I scare pretty easily, I have to say.

Elamin: You were looking for scares and you didn't find any here, is that what happened?

Ian: Yeah. I didn't jump out of my seat much. You know, there weren't a lot of bumps and scares to be had along the way. But what it does do is it's very self-aware, and it does a really good job of critiquing a lot of these tropes and a lot of these things that we come to expect in horror movies. There's the stereotype of Black audiences always kind of talking back to the screen in terms of, like, "Why did the character do that? Girl, don't open that door!" And the characters within the film themselves are actually doing that job for you. Instead of you having to say, like, "Why would they do that? Why would they open that door?"

WATCH | Final trailer for The Blackening:

The characters are self-aware enough to kind of make those decisions within the film. So that's kind of the cleverness of the writing…. It has that kind of middle-class-Black sensibility about it, and that's the other thing I kind of liked about it. There wasn't a lot of these "hood" kind of caricature characters. These are the kind of people I went to college with, and the conceit of the film is that these college friends are coming together for a weekend. So in that respect, I really liked it and it really had a lot of elements of Black culture and Black life that are helping to drive the story along.

Elamin: Jordan Peele's Get Out, I would say, has kind of given us a big horror reset in the last couple of years. We've had quite a few horror movies that centre Black narratives and characters since Get Out came out. I'm curious if you think we've seen the last Black character get sacrificed way too soon in a horror movie?

Sarah-Tai: I mean, absolutely not. The reason I'm so tired and so welcoming to something like The Blackening is because Get Out really opened the doors — or at least opened the market — to everyone wanting to cash in on the success of Get Out without really understanding how it was functioning as a film and how it was functioning on Black people watching it. We got films like Antebellum, TV shows like Lovecraft Country or THEM — this wave of so-called Black-made media that is still invested in this spectacle of Black death that has shaped genre filmmaking, even in films that are directed by Black folks. Even the new Candyman gets it so completely wrong.

I think people are more conscientious, in the absolute base level, of representation of Black characters dying — literally just in terms of numbers. But we're in this new era of so-called representation where it can be the same if not more traumatizing, especially because a lot of it is rooted in real-life violence. And I think there's definitely a lack of knowledge and a lack of care in showing Black life on screen a lot of the time. And I think of Christina Sharpe saying, and this is kind of dumb to bring up in a conversation about The Blackening, but I think about her saying, "Spectacle is not repair" — in terms of films like Antebellum.

Elamin: Like simply watching something that is violent, that has happened to Black people — that does not necessarily mean that you've somehow resolved the question of what's happening on the screen, right?

Sarah-Tai: Exactly. It's not an inherently restorative practice.

Elamin: Right. Ian, what do you make of this angle?

Ian: I would agree with Sarah-Tai again, that I don't think we've seen the last of Black characters being disposed of early in these kinds of films. I think the other part of it is, Jordan Peele really understands how to tell a Black-centered story that layers in a lot of themes and issues that are kind of central to Black existence and Black life in a way that informs the horror and other writers … who think like, "Oh, well all I have to do is throw in some more Black characters into the story and make them more central to the storyline." But a lot of times it just kind of comes off as window-dressing and doesn't really inform the storytelling or the themes of the story that's being told within the context of the film. So I think it's one of those things that's two steps forward, maybe one step back in a lot of ways.

Elamin: Ian, what do you make of the idea that having more Black people create horror or create anything does not then equate to suddenly taking out all the troubling tropes that we see. You're a screenwriter yourself. Do you think that simply having more Black screenwriters would solve the problem of trying to deal with some of these troubling stereotypes?

Ian: I think it can. I mean as people always say, we're not a monolith, and Black screenwriters don't necessarily all think the same way or want to write about the same things, or write about the theme of Blackness and Black identity in the same way. But I do think there's something to the idea that a Black person is going to think about how these characters function within a story and what kind of stories they want to tell in a way that even the most well-meaning non-Black person who wants to explore these story worlds and these kind of characters are just not going to do. I think in a lot of ways it is a way forward in terms of dismantling some of these tropes and these problematic things that we see within these movies.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Ty Callender.