By Danielle Broadway and Rollo Ross
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – For actor Antoinette Robertson, being in the horror comedy movie “The Blackening” with an all-Black main cast was an opportunity to combine comedy and cultural healing after years of witnessing the racist trope of Black people dying first in horror films.
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)
