13. “The Blackening” (dir. Tim Story)
How it stacks up in 2023 horror: DeWayne Perkins’ long-gestating lampooning of the way horror movies treat Black characters was one of the year’s freshest projects, smartly revisiting a history of racism in the genre while laying the foundation for a franchise that could run for years to come. —CZ
Read IndieWire’s review: “The influences in ‘The Blackening’ range from from ‘Friends’ and ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ to ‘Get Out,’ with references to both the sunken place and ‘The Shining’ sketch from ‘Key and Peele.’ It interrogates the idea of Blackness, and the stupid attempts made to quantify it. Embracing clichés and stereotypes, and then twisting them, allows the film to examine Blackness: Does being a gay Black man makes you less Black than someone who says the N-word more often? Or someone who once belonged in a gang?
More importantly, the film specifically examines Blackness through the lens of whiteness, making a white man the enemy and showing how an outside force wreaks havoc among the closed group. The film jokes about Black suffering, but this is far from trauma porn. It’s a truly Black horror comedy.” —Rafael Motamayor