There are two games at play in “The Blackening,” a comedic horror film with more jokes than jump scares.
The first is the titular race-baiting board game with the grotesque Jim Crow-style figurine that Morgan (Yvonne Orji) and her boyfriend, Shawn (Jay Pharoah), discover as they explore the cabin they have rented for a reunion of college friends.
It tests our familiarity with horror tropes while messing with the variegated verities of Black identity.
The film’s marketing come-on, “We Can’t All Die First,” winks at the notion that when there is a Black person in a predominantly white horror film, he or she is sure to be the first lamb (Black sheep?)
Looking like a charred version of the Creature From the Black Lagoon and wielding the whitest weapon on earth — a crossbow — the movie’s masked killer has an answer for that.
Persons:
Jim Crow, Morgan, Yvonne Orji, Shawn, Jay Pharoah, —, Viv, Bel, Tim Story, Tracy Oliver, Dewayne Perkins, ” winks