Could The Blackening be the sleeper hit of the summer?

The thing about sleeper hits is that they’re hard to predict. By definition, they’re supposed to catch us by surprise. But sometimes there are signs that a little movie—like, for instance, The Blackening—is destined to find an audience. Box office success isn’t guaranteed by a massive budget or an all-star cast or TV ads or a poster at every bus stop. Sometimes all it takes is a tight premise, cleverly executed, and a loyal target audience that will turn out and enthusiastically spread the word. By that measure, The Blackening, which premieres in theaters on June 16, may have what it takes to break out from the crowded movie pack this summer.

It doesn’t hurt if the idea has been floating around for a while. You may have seen the viral Comedy Central short from 2018 that inspired the film. Or, if you’re among a select few, you caught some iteration of the stage show featuring the original sketch that set the whole project in motion. In 2022, the world finally got to see The Blackening in its final form at the Toronto International Film Festival during a premiere described by Deadline as a “raucous event.” That screening set off a bidding war among distributors (with Lionsgate emerging victorious). Now that more moviegoers are getting a chance to see the film in preview screenings, the buzz keeps growing.

Taking cues from metatextual horror films like Scream, Cabin In The Woods, and Scary Movie, The Blackening follows a group of former college friends who meet up for a reunion at a rustic mountain cabin where they’re attacked by a mysterious killer. Based on the horror trope that the Black character is usually the first to die, they’re forced to play a sick game to determine which of them is “the Blackest.” You could describe it as a very funny thriller or a legitimately scary comedy and either way you’d be right. It’s also a solid social commentary, with a heavy seasoning of cultural references thrown in to spice it up.

A sketchy beginning

Dewayne Perkins, who co-wrote the script and also stars in the film as a character named Dewayne, has been with the project from the start. Even he was startled by its runaway success. “Being able to see that journey, it’s insane,” Perkins told The A.V. Club in an exclusive interview. “Like, I can think about it and I’m like, ‘Wow, what a crazy ride. Who knew?’ Because I didn’t. And doing press, people ask, ‘Did you think that, like, this has the potential to be a film?’ And I just didn’t because I didn’t think that’s how it worked.”

Perkins came up with the idea that became The Blackening as a sketch for a comedy show he was doing with some friends in Chicago, and later in Washington D.C. at the Woolly Mammoth theater. As part of the improv group 3peat, he recreated the sketch as a short film for Comedy Central, which went viral, receiving hundreds of thousands of likes and shares across social media. One of the people who saw it was Tracy Oliver, who happens to know a little something about creating a sleeper hit as the screenwriter of Girls Trip. She got in touch with Perkins and convinced him that the short could be expanded into a feature.

“I was writing a sketch because I was in a sketch show,” Perkins recalls. “Then we got to film it and I was like, ‘Oh, this is cool.’ Because I knew visually you can do things that we couldn’t do on stage. We could actually give it the tone of a horror movie. So then when I went viral, I was like, ‘Wow, it went viral. I’ve never had something go viral. This is the win. Like, I’m so lucky.’ And then when Tracy called I said, ‘What the hell? I didn’t know this.’ When she said this has the potential to be a movie, that’s when I believed it.”

Mixing genres for maximum effect

One of the things audiences who have seen the film so far have responded most positively to is its deft balance of horror and comedy, as well as the thought put into the microcosm of racial politics represented by a group of Black people forced to perform whiteness in order to stay alive. “The relationship between horror and comedy are so close,” Perkins says. “They’re emotionally very close. And so much of the horror and trauma within Blackness, I think, is often countered with levity. And I feel like that is something that we very much wanted to embed within the film.”

Perkins, a fan of horror himself, wanted to pay homage to successful franchises that have blended genres with a wink or used horror tropes as comic devices. But he also wanted to create something new that audiences hadn’t seen before. “There’s just so many films that we pulled from and that we were inspired from that we wanted to comment on,” he says. “Because we wanted to make something that felt new and like an extension of the horror genre. We didn’t want to just remake something. So that was very important for us to kind of figure out where The Blackening fits. Like, where is the hole that we can fill? Versus just recreating something that we’ve already seen before.”

A legacy franchise in the making?

Even if The Blackening doesn’t become a box office smash (it’ll be competing with a couple of caped crusaders and all the other summer blockbusters at the megaplex), it likely won’t go unnoticed by its target audience. It may get a boost when it comes to streaming, and live on long after it leaves theaters, and it figures to make for fun movie nights for years to come. Whatever happens with the release, Perkins is just happy to have gotten this far.

“Every step of this journey has been very surprising and so positive,” he says. “I’m just very, very grateful that that journey is attached to this film, mainly because I really love the art that came out of it, but I also think it’s pretty inspirational growing up where I grew up and seeing that people can see that this is possible. So I just love that part of the filmmaking process, that unique journey.”

Still, he adds, The Blackening’s growing momentum going into its opening weekend is encouraging, and bodes well for its chances to stand out from the crowd.

“I’m very grateful that people are receiving it in the way that we intended,” Perkins says. “You scream. You laugh. It’s just a moviegoing experience that I think people are craving. It’s interactive. It just reminds me of how much fun movies are. I want for people to understand, like, what we were trying to do, for them to understand the commentary, but also see that at the end of the day, this is a fun, silly horror movie about friendship. I’m so, so happy that it’s getting the response that it has been. And I just really hope that that translates at the box office because I’m trying to make some more of them.”

When asked if he’d really be willing to come back and do it all again in a sequel if the film is a success, Perkins doesn’t hesitate: “I’d be stoked if The Blackening became my legacy franchise. Let’s do it, baby!”