“I was working in Chicago in improv and sketch comedy,” recalls comedian and screenwriter Dewayne Perkins. “There were other black people like me desperate to work together because we felt we were all tokenized.”  So, the comedians formed an all black sketch show called Afro-Futurism for Second City. Things took off from there.

Later, a sketch called The Blackening with Perkins in the “3Peat” comedy theater trio about a group of friends trapped in a house by a killer who will spare them, if they hand over who they think is the “blackest” in the group. “The sketch was so easy to write because it was such a parallel to what I was feeling in my life at the time,” adds Perkins. They filmed the sketch for Comedy Central and it went viral.

This was the premise of his first feature who he co-wrote with Tracy Oliver. Dewayne stars alongside Antoinette Robinson, Sinqua Walls, Grace Byers, X Mayo, Melvin Gregg, Jermaine Fowler, Yvonne Orji, and Jay Pharoah.

Dewayne Perkins and Tracy Oliver approached their screenplay with the core ideas, “If all of us were in a horror movie we still had to talk about the tropes of tokenism. But if we were all black, then how could they kill us off first?” Perkins notes that the film adds the tone he originally envisioned in the sketch. “Because when we did the sketch on stage, there was a level of imagination you had to have because we didn’t have a set.” Filming The Blackening allowed the filmmaker to expand it into a horror movie while the actors are still telling all their stage jokes.

Horror Or Comedy?

Genre mashups are deceptively difficult to write in terms of screenwriters balancing the prominent genres on the page. Perkins classifies The Blackening as being slightly more comedy than horror harking to his improv comedy background.

Horror comedies run the risk of falling into parodies of other horror films. Dewayne Perkins was acutely aware of this and ensured the comedy was measured and the jokes were organic.

There are references to Scream, Cabin in the Woods, and Friday the 13th

“Tracy Oliver and I have a very large breath of knowledge about horror. Our conversations were more about taking what we knew about horror and allowing these specific characters to like exist in that, and then naturally see where the conflicts lie.” They studied the patterns in contained horrors. Of one character does one thing, it has a knockoff effect on the other characters, and so on. “That creates a new lane within the genre. We wanted to be very clear that what we were doing was new because there are so few data points when it comes to black people in horror and comedy.”

Other discussions included references to Keenen Ivory Wayans’ Scary Movie and Jordan Peele’s Get Out. “It’s like neither of those. It’s not as broad as Scary Movie and it’s not as serious as Get Out,” states Perkins.

Dewayne Perkins

Giving a subtle wink to movies like Scary Movie which is about a bumbling killer trying to kill a group of teens is purely a reference point. “We’re taking a scene and we’re parodying it when we’re putting these people in the exact situation. And for us, it was more about creating an environment that harkened to some of these movies, but was not a recreation. It was a new space and we really wanted to have a real stakes. It was very important for us to imbue the characters with a grounded sensibility so that they were believable as friends and as people that we cared about.”

Continues Perkins, “If we’re going to make a horror comedy where we leaned more into comedy, we had to make sure that audiences cared if these characters lived or died. Because if they didn’t care, then it takes away from the importance of what these characters represent so that when they are making jokes in these high-stakes situations, it feels organic to them and not us trying to make jokes for the sake of making jokes.”

Writing An Ensemble Cast With Seven Main Characters

Tracy Oliver and Dewayne Perkins masterfully juggle seven characters trapped in a house on the page. Each with sufficient screen time, their own arcs, and their own interactions with each other. Dewayne attributes this skill from his theater background. “The goal was to give each character such distinct personalities that people would instantly know to separate them and you instantly know who they are. And then the goal was, by the end, to force people to expand the box which they thought they knew these characters in,” states Perkins.

For Perkins and Oliver, it was matter of subverting expectations of who each character was until the killer’s identity was finally revealed. “It never felt like their characterizations were crossing each other. It felt like they were all parallel and intersected when they needed to as friends. But each person felt like they were on their own specific journeys too.”

Creating a new lane isn’t entirely about subverting expectations. Audiences expect certain components in a horror comedy such as gore and giggles. “The goal was to give enough of what people know about horror and then one thing that’s different. Most horror films are predictable and the joke is not who the killer is. The joke is why are they doing it. That is the twist. I feel you should figure out who the killer is early and then we’re figuring out is why these people make the choices they make. This is a character analysis this is not necessarily trying to make the most complex whodunnit film. I didn’t set out to create the new Knives Out.”

“Many horror movies are formulaic, but the end product is different to make it unique. That’s the whole point. It changes the genre by allowing new voices to exist in it.”

Elaborates Perkins, “The plot in The Blackening was us. How do we let the villain have an arc as well? Why are they doing this? Then we worked backwards to have a plot that spoke to the motivations of the characters.”

Happy Juneteenth

A weekend away at a secluded cabin to celebrate Juneteenth was the perfect location for The Blackening. “The Juneteenth of it all felt  just in line thematically. The idea of community within Black culture. A lot of care comes from community-based activism just from a level of solidarity. We really wanted to hit that pretty hard thematically. Even on a day of celebration and freedom these people are not allowed to bask in that because they have to actively fight.” This applies to most marginalized people generally.

“In terms of dissecting blackness it was very important for us to show, and not tell. That’s why we have seven very distinct characters who are all black. You can instantly show that blackness is not monolithic. To be tokenized in a way where one black person has to represent all facets of blackness is absurd,” concludes the comedian.

You can’t quantify blackness as one thing

“Quantifying blackness is such an objective thing. That was the underlying goal of the whole film and the guiding light of simply allowing these characters to be as authentic as they possibly can so that people can see blackness for themselves. The box that you thought that you could put them in is restrictive. If you give these kind of characters the space to exist in this way, that is how you write good stories,” advises Dewayne.

Writing Dialogue

Writing dialogue for seven distinct character voices is challenge that Perkins and Oliver achieve. “There was some improv, but surprisingly, a lot of the dialogue is straight from the script. The script provided a really good foundation. And being an improviser, that is how I write. I was pretending to be seven people and talked to myself. This is how the conversation works. The actors were helped when I referenced the specificity of each line.”

Dialogue is about delivering information. “We need this information for this part, we need other information for that part. But as a filmmaker, I understand where collaboration comes in. If you feel like your character will say it slightly differently, then say it differently. Having that amount of freedom allows the actors to embody their characters more because they felt an ownership of them.”

“Nobody was ever trying to rewrite the script. They were simply given the freedom to exist fully as these characters. There were improvised moments and a lot of them made it into the film. But that improv was based 100% off what was already in the script. They were pockets to add specificity.”

Morgan (Yvonne Orji) and Shawn (Jay Pharaoh). Photo by Glen Wilson

Dewayne Perkins is thankful of the privilege of being both an actor and a writer in The Blackening. “It just added so much more to the experience.”

How Black is Too Black?

The underlying theme of The Blackening is about revenge from the character who was deemed “most black” and should therefore die next. “There were a couple of different versions of the end,” recalls Perkins. “Some of them were interesting, but we ended up choosing the one because we wanted to continue the conversation around blackness and what that means for different people. Even the villain has that point of view. It’s a very heightened version of that. It’s the worst version of what your blackness being questioned can do. Even when black people do it to ourselves. We wanted to really keep that conversation outside of mixed company.”

To conclude our conversation, we asked Dewayne Perkins how he’d like to be perceived as a screenwriter. “I am a writer who knows how to create entertaining content with an underlying message. I think very deeply about the things that I create. I think that there is so much power in comedy and laughter and what you can ‘hide in the medicine’ by adding a little sugar. And so as I continue to grow and write, I think the through line of my work would be exactly that; that there is always a statement to be made, even if you don’t see it. Nothing I write is not thought of. There’s a specificity to my work. There’s an intellectual aspect, but at the end of the day, it’s an entertaining package, because that is the easiest way to get you to understand and to have empathy for my point of view.“