The Blackening

There’s no one out there conning Hollywood like Tim Story. The director of 2005’s Fantastic Four flop and the utterly soulless Tom & Jerry live-action feature is back with his foray into the horror genre (that no one asked for) – The Blackening, a horror satire about a group of Black friends who are reuniting on the weekend of Juneteenth in a cabin in the woods to party it up.

The Blackening’s Scream-like cold open focuses on the couple – Morgan (played by Insecure’s Yvonne Orji) and Shawn (SNL alumni Jay Pharoah) – who are prepping the cabin the night before for the weekend’s imminent shenanigans. While they are scoping out the house, they discover a racist game (with blackface and all) and ironically begin to play it. The game starts with a question: Name a Black actor who survives a horror movie, which they immediately get wrong, nosediving into the weeds of a joke about how the Scream franchise couldn’t afford Jada Pinkett Smith, and that’s why they killed her off early (cue Orji and Pharoah breaking the fourth wall to look at the audience to aggressively foreshadow what’s to come).

This joke loses them round one, which results in their (very clunky) deaths. It’s not quite as clever or engaging as a Scream opening, or even as aggressively bombastic as a Scary Movie riff, because Story doesn’t quite know what tone he’s trying to nail. The Blackening meanders between comedy and straightforward slasher, never quite sticking the landing on either. Story’s flat direction doesn’t help, and furthermore, the lighting for his performers is inconsistent to a fault. Even the characters’ relations to one another are flimsy, making it extremely easy to pick out the mastermind behind the plot to kill this group of university buddies.

The only standout of the crew is Dewayne (Perkins), which might come as no surprise when you realize he’s a co-writer on the script with Tracy Oliver (Girls Trip). Dewayne is given some of the best pathos and lines, and is the only actor who won’t let the camera flatten all of his jokes. Although his jokes are very sitcom-friendly, they’re still some of the best of the bunch, even if it is mostly a sea of duds.

At the end of the day, The Blackening is a satire that’s not very good at satirizing. There’s no punchiness to the dialogue, no visual comedy to uplift the film’s flatline tone – it feels as phoned in as the rest of Story’s filmography. The Blackening feels like a cash grab, a film so blatantly made because “horror is so hot right now.” There’s no love for the genre, and if you don’t admire something to some degree, it’s hard to properly satirize it.