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.
What matters is that Tim Story and Tracy Oliver have crafted a film that functions on three levels simultaneously: a genuinely funny hangout comedy, a genuinely tense slasher thriller, and a genuinely incisive critique of racial performance.
Meanwhile, the actual "final showdown" is a chaotic, messy, and deeply democratic brawl. There is no singular hero. Everyone gets a moment, from the bougie friend who learns to swing a baseball bat to the token white friend (an excellent Diedrich Bader as the oblivious husband) who accidentally saves the day by being exactly as useless as they expect him to be. The Blackening arrived in a cultural moment where the conversation about representation has shifted from How many? to What kind? . The era of simply casting a Black actor in a horror film is over. The new question is: What do their Blackness and their relationship to the genre mean?
The Blackening 🏆
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.
What matters is that Tim Story and Tracy Oliver have crafted a film that functions on three levels simultaneously: a genuinely funny hangout comedy, a genuinely tense slasher thriller, and a genuinely incisive critique of racial performance. The Blackening
Meanwhile, the actual "final showdown" is a chaotic, messy, and deeply democratic brawl. There is no singular hero. Everyone gets a moment, from the bougie friend who learns to swing a baseball bat to the token white friend (an excellent Diedrich Bader as the oblivious husband) who accidentally saves the day by being exactly as useless as they expect him to be. The Blackening arrived in a cultural moment where the conversation about representation has shifted from How many? to What kind? . The era of simply casting a Black actor in a horror film is over. The new question is: What do their Blackness and their relationship to the genre mean? The joke, of course, is that the group—seven