[Source: CNN Entertainment]
Racism can be funny?
Well, not on the surface, of course. But comics and creatives have long used humour to break down stereotypes.
In the fractured world, we now live in, whatever works as far as I am concerned.
There’s a film out this week that uses tropes to get to some truth.
Let’s talk about it.
It is a well-known trope that Black characters in horror films are usually the first to die.
The new film “The Blackening” – about a group of friends on a Juneteenth getaway who find themselves trapped with a killer – skewers the genre and asks, if the entire cast of a horror movie is Black, who dies first?
I recently interviewed one of the stars of “The Blackening,” Yvonne Orji.
“They go on a vacation in the woods, which, first of all, no Black person is doing that. Ever,” Orji joked about the film’s setting.
Our conversation turned to a more substantive theme in the movie, described by Orji as a look at “who holds Blackness.”
“[When] President Obama was in office, it was ‘Is he Black enough?’ It was like, well, what does that even mean?,” Orji said. “I’m Nigerian American. Is my black experience different? [The film] is a satire, but it’s a really interesting conversation starter.”
It will be interesting to see how those themes are explored in the context of an edge-of-your-seat slasher movie. One thing is for sure: the best kind of art makes us think, as well as entertain and thrills us.
“The Blackening” is in theatres Friday.
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