The Blackening

Seven friends gather for a reunion weekend and find a board game called The Blackening in the cabin, with a racist caricature at its centre, that forces them to answer questions about Black culture or die.

Tim Story directed it from a script by the sketch group 3Peat, and it is a genuine horror-comedy that runs on one sharp idea: the slasher rule that the Black character dies first cannot apply when everybody is Black, so who goes?

It is very funny, the cast has real chemistry, and the satire of both slasher conventions and respectability politics is smarter than the premise suggests.

The scene of the group arguing over who is the least Black, and therefore expendable, is the best in it.

It is not scary and does not try to be. It is a comedy that loves the genre.