Yesterday’s horror selection was a horror comedy that left a lot to be desired in both the horror and the comedy sections. I figured I would take today to look at a different horror comedy that I had been wanting to see so I could hopefully find a better representation of that genre. It wasn’t until about halfway through the movie that I began to realize that I might just not be the perfect person to be doing commentary on this. Oh well, here we go.

The movie centers around a group of friends getting together for a Juneteenth celebration. They were all friends in college and this is the first time they are going to be all together again in 10 years. They have rented a cabin in the woods to spend the weekend together but things start to go murderously wrong when they discover a board game in the cabin called The Blackening. This kicks off a struggle for survival against a masked killer that will test their friendship while taking a deep look at what it means to be Black in America.

I was extremely pleased to find that the movie didn’t sacrifice the tension or drama in order to have the comedy. So often horror comedy movies will either lazily hope their “hilarious” premise will carry the film so they don’t have to write any actual jokes (see the review of Slotherhouse) or it is so jokey as to be tiresome and overshadowing anything else (pretty much the entire Scary Movie franchise). The humor in The Blackening comes naturally from the characters interactions and the situation they’re in with some exaggerated bits for laughs. The characters are all believable and the way they play off each other feels like a real group of friends.

The main thrust of the movie, however, is about what it means to be Black. The entire plot hinges on the concept of blackness being a thing that one could quantify or solve for. The titular game that they are forced to play requires them to test their knowledge of black cultural touchstones and eventually says that they can survive if they sacrifice the one the deem “the blackest” among them. This sparks debate about whether blackness is tied up in how African one is, how gangster one is, how hard one fights for civil rights, and so on. It helps elevate what could have been a very simple horror comedy into something that engages with and pokes fun at the idea of a monolithic Black culture.

While I probably wasn’t the target audience for this movie, I thought it was a lot of fun. I think the horror aspect of it could have been amped up a bit more but that tends to be a failing in even the best horror comedy movies.

Score: 4 out of 5