The Blackening File

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.”

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It is a movie that asks: What if the scariest thing in the woods isn’t the man with the mask, but the fear that your own friends might think you’re “not really Black”? The Blackening

Released in June 2023, The Blackening arrived as both a much-needed antidote to decades of cinematic marginalization and a razor-sharp comedy that refuses to let its audience laugh without also squirming. Directed by Tim Story ( Ride Along , Barbershop ) and written by Tracy Oliver ( Girls Trip ) and Dewayne Perkins (who also stars as the fan-favorite character Dewayne), the film is not merely a parody. It is an intervention. For generations, the horror genre has had a well-documented blind spot. The "Black character dies first" trope is so pervasive that it has its own Wikipedia page. From Friday the 13th to Scream , Black characters were often disposable—plot devices to raise the stakes before the white final girl took her stand. In the standard slasher film, when a group

When they weren't dying first, they were the "sassy best friend," the comic relief, or the oracle who mysteriously knew the house was haunted but stuck around anyway. A black board game

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 film then smash-cuts to its title card. The point is made: This is a funeral for the old trope, and the corpse is laughing. The central conceit of The Blackening is elegantly diabolical. The group’s captor forces them to play a board game where they must answer trivia questions about Black culture. Get a question wrong, and one of their friends dies.