"The Blackening" Review: It's Satire! It's Horror! It's... Nothing?

A promising premise yields disappointing results in this confused, aimless horror-comedy.

June 22, 2023

On April 23, 1954, Hank Aaron stepped to the plate at Sportsman’s Park in downtown St. Louis. He hit a home run off Cardinals’ pitcher Vic Raschi, the first of his illustrious career.

Nearly 20 years later, on April 8, 1974, Aaron, then 40, stepped into the batter’s box at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, home of the Atlanta Braves, for whom he had played his entire Major League career. As Los Angeles Dodgers’ pitcher Al Downing toed the rubber, Aaron sat at 714 career home runs, tied with the great Babe Ruth for the all-time career record.

It should have been a time of celebration, but this was 1970s America. Aaron spent the off-season getting inundated with death threats from bigots incensed at his inevitable toppling of The Great Bambino. Ruth’s widow, Clare Hodgson, encouraged respect for Aaron, but her pleas went unheard.

Aaron had the world on his shoulders, an emblem of resilience, class, skill, and honor, who much of America would rather see dead than on the precipice of history.

Aaron launched Downing’s 1-0 delivery deep into left field. Dodgers’ outfielder Bill Buckner, one day to make his mark on baseball history, nearly fell over the fence trying to rob Aaron. Alas, the ball sailed into the Dodger bullpen.

Aaron was the home run king.

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After months of ceaseless hate, a painful reflection of the deep-seated racism that plagued a divided nation, he had achieved what many thought impossible.

Remarking on the chase, Aaron told a reporter, “I don’t want them to forget Ruth. I just want them to remember me.”

To be remembered, one must achieve something outstanding, exemplify the best of their field, and stand above the rest. Aaron amassed 3,000 hits without his 755 career home runs. He holds the career records for RBIs and total bases and batted .305 for his 23-year career, but the home runs, his toppling of the game’s most iconic hero, have immortalized him.

Movies must behave similarly to make an impact and get remembered. It is not enough to exist as something we deem necessary; in time, that necessity will fade, and the lack of substance will expose an undeserved cultural impression, which, too, shall fade.

It is not enough to take aim and fire; a movie has to make its intentions clear and follow through: anything less, and the audience will feel underwhelmed.

Original entertainment needs a hook. Franchises can exploit history, luring audiences with a return to all they know and love, but new ideas require something enticing, the “why” behind the “what” of moviegoing. The Blackening succeeds at this, as any of its trailers would tell you: a group of Black friends, always the first to die in horror films, are staying at a cabin in the woods for a reunion weekend. Inside the home’s game room, they find a board game called “The Blackening,” centered by a face reminiscent of “Jocko” the lawn jockey. The game is simple: continuously pick question cards that challenge the group to remedy numerous racial caricatures. Should they fail, they die.

It offers many opportunities for critique, send-up, and satire, all necessary for a horror comedy with socio-political implications. Unfortunately, concepts alone cannot make a good movie, and the presence of opportunity differs from capitalization.

The Blackening suffers from many problems, but its most damning is the fact that, well, it’s not that Black. Each character feels like they’ve spent their post-graduate lives assimilating into white society, having their personalities and mannerisms worked through a filter that makes them more palatable to a white audience. The vernacular feels strained, like the movie is too afraid of being Black to be Black.

It’s disheartening that we have yet to solve this problem. Moonlight and its spiritual follow-up, A Thousand and One, offered complex, unapologetic perspectives on Black America, refusing to purify its experiences or sanitize its characters. Juan, Chiron, and Teresa’s “Blackness,” an idea to which The Blackening routinely refers, feels natural while never being singular. They come from different places and are different people imbued with individual characteristics and perspectives. None of them act, speak, interact, or perceive the exact same way, but their race and its effect on their actions, speech, interactions, and perceptions, are tangible.

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Black characters should not revel in centuries-old stereotypes, catering to antiquated ideas of what it means to be Black, but Black creators also shouldn’t pull punches instead of socking us in the jaw.

As such, we behold a movie that knows it wants to be something but has no concrete idea of precisely what that is or how to accomplish it. It is the most damning curse to befall a film or anyone stuck behind a senior citizen who brazenly attempts to navigate the United States Interstate system: having nowhere to go but aaaaall day to get there.

Eventually, that aimlessness suffocates a movie that runs only 97 minutes long. The group goes back and forth to and from the game room, trapped in an environment too small to justify even a short runtime. The house isn’t a character in and of itself, so the film gains nothing by exploring it, and thus it doesn’t. Instead, it just bounces everyone from one room to another, hoping that by routinely shifting the scenery, we won’t notice nothing much occurs.

Sadly, we do notice, and what we observe is not worth our time. All The Blackening does is select the most basic stereotypes of white stupidity in horror movies (like the age-old folly of splitting up), exploit the most mundane stereotypes about Black culture, and states they exist. Pointing something out can earn a mild laugh, but unwillingness to go for the jugular always results in diminishing returns.

The Blackening's funniest lines are the ones we least expect and go deeper than the familiar. As the group gets forced to choose which of them is “the blackest” and thus get sacrificed, bi-racial Allison turns to Clifton, the cleft-lipped relative stranger of the group, and says that he showed up despite not getting invited, which is “the blackest shit she’s ever heard in her life.”

When the killer emerges from the basement, reformed f-boi Nnamdi grabs the gun and fires with the Glock facing sideways. Clifton swoops in, squares the gun, and slinks back.

It’s that willingness to look inward and drag in-jokes to the surface that makes for genuine subversion, or, at least, something new for the unfamiliar to embrace and something familiar at which the initiated can laugh. We know white people always split up and Black people die first; if this were 1998, The Blackening would hit harder.

But it’s not. We’re 23 years into the millennium, and if a movie like The Blackening wants to succeed, it needs the guts to offer something new. It cannot give us actors straining to create an aura they aren’t committed to, aiming more for Vine vibes with quick-fire soundbites than consistent, satirical humor. It cannot recycle the same tired jokes and expect us to congratulate it for being daring and subversive. It cannot fail to commit and demand we exalt it as something it's not.

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Horror-comedy is a nearly impossible balancing act to master; many horror films employ cheap gimmicks for scares instead of being atmospheric, and most comedies devolve into back-and-forths where characters talk about what insane thing the other resembles. Creating a good film in either genre, one that truly defies convention and brings something fresh to the table, is difficult enough. The Blackening doesn’t know what to be, how to be, or even what makes a good movie. If you doubted for a millisecond that the white clerk was the killer who was merely a hired gun for Clifton and thus consider this a spoiler, you're a lost cause.

It doesn’t help that it fails to establish the friend group as individuals with specific personalities, relying on that “Aw, shucks, remember when?” form of introduction to legitimize their bonds or that we can say, “Man, the back half really drags,” about a film under 100 minutes.

But The Blackening’s most damning trait is its unwillingness to embrace all it claims to purvey. Satire requires introspection; horror requires inventiveness; comedy requires daring. The Blackening is desperate to convince us it has all three, but it doesn’t.

What does it have? An audience, a concept white critics feel obligated to praise the movie for, and the potential to be something incredible. Sadly, a film's potential is meaningless if it gets wasted. It’s not Hank Aaron, who took eight games to register the first of his record-breaking 755 career home runs, who chose a sport where the greatest success stories fail 70% of the time.

It’s a movie; it has one chance to get it right. The Blackening didn't fine-tune its stroke, swinging and missing at the high heat and getting tricked by the last-second break of the cutter. Thus, it does not achieve greatness, not in the general sense necessary to earn acclaim, and certainly not in the distinguished way required to get remembered.