How does it feel to be a part of the horror canon in a more open way? He played Brenda’s (Regina Hall) closeted boyfriend, and his obvious queerness was the butt of the joke. The last openly gay Black character in a summer horror movie that I can recall is Shawn Wayans in Scary Movie. I had to learn how to do that my whole life.” Yes, these are Black people and they’re going to be Black and if you don’t know the implications of that, then figure it out. “Cinema just allows characters to be white and exist, so we wanted to have that same energy. And it does so for a reason, says Perkins. The Blackening (tagline: “We can’t all die first”) underscores each character’s Blackness with tongue-in-cheek cues and jokes that only the key players and Black moviegoers would understand. They fight to save one another’s lives, fully aware that their chances of living are slim to none - at least according to the lethal receipts in American horror movies. The longtime homies find themselves in peril when an unknown murderer begins hunting them all down. Now, in collaboration with Girl’s Trip screenwriter Tracy Oliver, who co-wrote the script with Perkins, and director Tim Story ( Ride Along, Shaft), he’s turned his self-aware short into a feature-length film in which he co-stars as one of nine friends visiting a spooky cabin in the woods to celebrate Juneteenth. Perkins’s satirical 2018 comedy sketch, “The Blackening,” was his first attempt at poking fun at how we view Blackness in horror. His new film, The Blackening, on the other hand, skewers those same stereotypes and finds humor in horror’s most predictable clichés. His existence as a queer Black man in horror defies the tropes of a genre that has often reduced people like him to inauthentic caricatures or disposable fodder, usually fated to be a slasher villain’s first victims. Dewayne Perkins doesn’t play by cinema’s preestablished rules.
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