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Warning! This article contains spoilers for The Blackening. If you've yet to watch the movie and don't want to know how it ends, turn back now!
A bunch of unsuspecting people rock up to a cabin in the woods for the weekend, only to become the targets of a deranged killer? Horror movie fans have seen the same story play out a thousand times, so it can be difficult to surprise them. With The Blackening, though, co-writer Tracy Oliver had the added challenge of subverting expectations in another way...
"We didn't want to have people walk in and be like, 'Oh, it's this person. White people, for whatever reason, are after these Black people,'" she told GamesRadar+, in an interview conducted before the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. "That's not actually it at all."
Directed by Barbershop's Tim Story, the new horror comedy centers on school friends Lisa (Antoinette Robertson), Allison (Grace Byers), Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls), Shanika (X Mayo), King (Melvin Gregg), Clifton (Jermaine Fowler), and Dewayne (Dewayne Perkins, who co-wrote the screenplay with Oliver), who reunite for a Juneteenth party in the middle of nowhere. Suspicions arise when they arrive at the venue to find their pals Morgan and Shawn already missing, but it's not until the group engage with a wildly disrespectful board game ("What in the Jim Crow fuck?") inside the house that things take a turn.
After learning that Morgan and Shawn were killed by two anonymous attackers, the group spend the rest of the night trying to stay alive. Eventually, to cut a 90-minute story short, Allison winds up offing one of them, while the other gets his head caved in by Lisa – but a kill list in their pockets make it clear they weren't the masterminds behind this deadly cat-and-mouse.
With that, the movie's final act reveals that Clifton orchestrated the whole thing, desperate to make the others pay for "revoking his Black card" after he fluffed up a game of Spades 10 years prior. Turns out, the ridicule embarrassed and upset him so much that he drank for the very first time that fateful evening, and fatally ran over a woman on his drive home landing himself four years in jail – and he's been plotting his revenge ever since.
"We always wanted to lean into the idea that a racist white killer was after these Black people," says Oliver. "You see a confederate flag, you see this game that has very offensive imagery on it; there's that bit where Shanika's character comes in and sees the guy with the one eye in the store? It's all very ominous and feels like we're foreshadowing some darker stuff.
"So, yeah, we definitely wanted to do a kind of deliberate racial misdirect – and yet, the entire time, the killer is amongst the group," she continues. "We just didn't want it to be obvious, but we also wanted to make sure that we were actually making commentary on what it means to be Black, and how there is no one way to be that."
The Blackening is in UK cinemas now. For more, check out our list of the most exciting upcoming horror movies heading our way, or our ranking of the best horror movies of all time.
