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It
was also a chance to let the rest of the world enter an
environment with Black characters that go beyond "the Black guy
always dies first" Hollywood stereotype.
"It feels like we're letting the world in on our group chat as a
culture," said Robertson, known for her role in the TV series
"Dear White People."
Co-star Sinqua Walls chimed in, saying “Gotcha. Abracadabra. Now
you’ve got to watch all of us."
The Lionsgate movie follows a group of seven Black friends from
college who take a Juneteenth trip to a cabin in the woods and
are confronted by a killer that assesses their degree of
blackness to determine who to kill first.
The film premieres in theaters on Friday, ahead of Monday's
Juneteenth holiday celebrating the emancipation of enslaved
African Americans.
In the canon of American horror films, the Black character is
often introduced for the sake of being killed off first without
any place within the central story plot. The all-Black ensemble
in “The Blackening” provides a different kind of storyline.
New York University professor Shatima Jones told Reuters “The
Blackening” shows Black people as human while blackness “kind of
becomes its own character.”
Jones, an expert in Black experiences in film, said that since
each main character is Black, there’s more room for the story to
explore the complexity of Blackness without devaluing it like
other horror films.
“If there's a bunch of Black people and the Black person dies
first, it takes away that specificity if you're tokenized,”
fellow cast member Dewayne Perkins added. “That's a statement.
Taking away that tokenization takes away the trope because
there's no longer an indictment on that person of color, on that
Black person.”
(Reporting by Danielle Broadway and Rollo Ross; Editing by Mary
Milliken and David Gregorio)
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