Review #343: The Blackening (2022)
October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #16 - The Blackening (2022)
Now THAT is a movie! (I really like this one so I'm only going to give some very light spoilers, fair warning.)
The Blackening follows a group of friends (I think friends from back in college?) who have rented out a house for their first Juneteenth celebration in many years. They plan to hang out, party, do drugs, play games, and catch up- but when they find a mysterious (and incredibly racist-looking) board game that challenges them to name various black pop culture touchpoints or one of them will be killed, this friend reunion becomes a deadly game of cat and mouse.
This movie is an utter delight. It's funny, it moves along at a nice clip, the dialogue and characters are written fantastically, and the plot has some great twists and turns I genuinely did not expect. It's serious at times, it's self-aware at times, it toys around with tropes while criticizing them at the same time, and it's clearly made by people who love horror films and black culture and so they found a perfect way to marry both ideas into one movie that ticks every box and hits every target with a bullseye.
I will admit that I found the creepy board game to be what grabbed me the most, so I was a little disappointed when the game ended up being discarded after the first half of the film, and I was really expecting the threat to end up being supernatural in some way (which I don't think it ultimately is). I'm still happy with what I got, but the promise of the cold open of the film was a teensy bit better than what was eventually delivered. But you may feel differently, so watch this if you haven't already!
I really don't have much else to say about the movie itself; it's solid, it's fun, and it's incredibly well-written. This is definitely a recommend from me.
Overall Rating: 10/10 Ridiculously Spacious Air Ducts
Movie Tropes: This movie definitely pokes fun at the "the black guy always dies first in a horror movie" trope a few times (in fact it takes up like 40% of the poster above), but I want to talk about that for a moment. This has been a personal bugbear of mine for a long time- where did that trope originate? It seems to have been ubiquitous my entire life (getting referenced by comedians and even in movies themselves all the time), but like... is it true? I can't think of many horror movies where the black guy dies first, and whenever I ask around I maybe get like one or two movies (some of which aren't horror movies, and nearly all of which came out long after people started referencing the trope). So maybe it's not true now, but was at one point? But if I can't think of many movies where it happens, and neither can anybody else... how do we know this trope was ever true, if everyone is just repeating it because they assume it used to be true?
A while back I decided to do some research to find as many movies as possible where this trope occurs. The largest list I was able to find online is from TVTropes.org, which (as of this writing) lists 127 examples in the "Films - Live Action" section, spanning the entire history of cinema. While that sounds like a lot, that's less than the number of the horror films released in 2024 alone (according to IMDB, there was about 150 or so, not counting short films) so it's hard to say it's something that "always" happens. And that's assuming we take the entire TVTropes list for granted- if you actually look at the examples given, the vast majority of them bend or break the rules of "black" "guy" "dies" "first" and "horror". Sometimes, they include all minorities, regardless of ethnicity or gender. Sometimes, the list includes an unnamed black person that dies first, other times it excludes other characters that died first if those characters are unnamed or have no lines. (One example given is Midsommar, where they give so many qualifiers- "the first one to die against his will onscreen"- so as to exclude eight other named characters who die first!) Many examples are not horror movies, and- here's the real kicker- the TVTropes list even includes examples where the person didn't even die. So while the full list is 127 examples (which, again, is less than one year's worth of horror movies), the actual number of movies that fit all of the criteria is only around 30, and nearly all of those are from the 90s or later, LONG after the trope had already been referenced in pop culture.
So I really do have to ask: has this trope EVER been real? It clearly isn't real anymore (again, only ~30 examples from the past thirty or forty years), but was it EVER true? Was there a rash of movies in the 50s and 60s that time has forgotten where the black dude always died first? That's definitely possible, but the fact that nobody in the current day has seen those movies to include them on the largest extant list for that trope, really makes it seem like everyone who jokes about it today has never lived in a time when the trope was real. And yet, so many people bring it up as if it's just a truth we all know.
Now, just for the record, all I'm saying is that "the black dude always dies first" isn't real. In fact, if you really look at it, the vast majority of movies (horror or otherwise) often have few or no minorities in them at all, which I think is the real issue here. I would definitely agree that people of color are poorly represented in cinema, and if that were the claim I'd be right there agreeing with it. But people don't say "Uh-oh, the person of color is going to be poorly-written in this one" they say "Uh-oh, the black guy is going to die first" and frankly, that just isn't true most of the time.
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