In answering that question, The Blackening does more than survive the tropes of horror. It resurrects them, embarrasses them, and finally—joyfully—buries them.
In the standard slasher film, when a group of friends stumbles upon a dusty, locked box in a remote cabin, curiosity usually kills the cat. But in Tim Story’s The Blackening , when the ensemble opens that box, they don’t find a cursed diary or a rusty knife. They find a board game. A black board game. With one instruction: “Play or die.” The Blackening
But here’s the twist: The questions aren’t about Black history or civil rights leaders. They are about respectability politics . One character is asked to name the most racist Friends episode. Another is forced to rank which member of the group is “the least Black.” The camera lingers on the faces of Lisa (Antoinette Robertson), a medical student whose fiancé is white, and Shanika (a scene-stealing X Mayo), the militant "Blerd" (Black nerd) who uses slang aggressively to prove her authenticity. In answering that question, The Blackening does more
The joke, of course, is that the group—seven Black friends reuniting for a Juneteenth weekend—has already been playing a game their entire lives. The game of survival as a Black person in a horror movie. But in Tim Story’s The Blackening , when