Film / The Blackening

Left to right: Allison, Shanika, Dewayne, Lisa, Nnamdi, Clifton, and King.

The Blackening is a 2023 Horror Comedy film directed by Tim Story based upon the short film of the same by the comedy improv troupe 3Peat. It stars Yvonne Orji, Grace Byers, Jermaine Fowler, Antoinette Robertson, Dewayne Perkins, and Jay Pharoah.

A group of African and African-American friends’ plans to celebrate Juneteenth in a cabin in the woods goes awry when they are targeted by a masked killer. The film premiered on Juneteenth Weekend, June 16, 2023. A sequel is in development.

Previews: Trailer, Trailer 2

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The Blackening contains examples of the following:

• Accidental Misnaming: Nobody else in the group can initially remember Clifton's name until they get it wrong and he corrects them.
• Accidental Murder: Clifton killed a woman while drunk driving ten years prior to the start of the movie.
• Affectionate Parody: The film is a parody of cabin in the woods type horror films and Saw type movies. The film seems to use this to comment on the treatment of African Americans in horror films.
• Agony of the Feet: To keep the killer from blocking the door with his foot, Shanika stabs him in the foot with a kitchen knife.
• And This Is for...: During Lisa's Punctuated Pounding as she beats the second killer to death with a candlestick, she shouts "This is for Shawn and Morgan!" on the first hit (whom the killer murdered already), and "This is for King!" for the next one (who's not dead, but was shot twice with a crossbow and seriously injured).
• Based on a True Story: Parodied by the opening of the movie:
  The following is based on real events...that never happened.
• Better than a Bare Bulb: The movie lampshades, discusses, and lampoons numerous different tropes involving black characters in fiction (some of which are, unfortunately, Truth in Television), horror movies, and black characters in horror movies, including but not limited to Black Dude Dies First (which is even right on the movie poster), Let's Split Up, Gang! vs Never Split the Party, racist hillbillies and cops and Police Brutality to black people, and the whole idea of The Whitest Black Guy vs. "the blackest" among a group of black people.
• Big Bad Friend: Played with. At least some of the others were friendly acquaintances with Clifton, who turns out to be the Big Bad, at college, but the fact that he was not a full-fledged member of their friend group is a major aspect of his present-day motivation for his grudge against them and trying to have them killed. Even in the present, it's pretty clear that his presence with the rest of them at the cabin is kind of awkward, and he's basically The Friend Nobody Likes; the other six unanimously vote to sacrifice him when forced to choose one of them. Still, they do feel pretty terrible about it, and then feel even worse when they think he's been killed, and they still do have clear feelings of betrayal when they learn he's the real mastermind.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • A twofer when the killer is shooting at Shanika while she tries to swim across the lake. King, who sees this from the tree he's hiding in, jumps the killer from above and starts fighting him. And once he ends up on the losing end of this fight, Allison recovers enough from her Adderall haze to take over the fight before he can murder him, and kills the thug instead.
  • After Dewayne shoots the other killer through the hand and downs him for a minute, he, Nnamdi, and Lisa don't notice the guy get back up and start advancing on them because they're too caught up in arguing about their personal issues, only for Shanika to use the final arrow from her own crossbow to shoot him as her group returns from the woods. And when this still doesn't kill him and he rounds on them, Lisa rushes in and beats the man to death with her candlestick.
  • At the climax, Clifton has Lisa, Shanika, Nnamdi, and Dewayne at crossbow-point in the basement and is about to kill them and dump their bodies in the well as he did to Shawn and Morgan. Allison and King, who are locked out of the cellar but watching the events on the TV screen, figure out how to use the killers' remote to turn all the lights off, giving the basement crew a chance to jump Clifton, steal his weapons, and turn the tables.
• Black Dude Dies First: Discussed quite a bit, including on the film's poster.
  • The game points out this trope as it demands the group of African and African-American friends sacrifice “the blackest” among them in exchange for freedom.
  • Also played straight at the beginning; while both Shawn and Morgan are black like the rest of the group of friends in the main cast, Shawn, the "dude" of the pair, is indeed the one to die first in the opening scenes, while Morgan is initially just captured and only killed later when she tries to escape (though still before the rest of the friend group arrives, as they later discover).
• Blackface-Style Caricature: The game contains a stereotypical depiction of a black person with pitch-black skin, large eyes, and exaggerated red lips. The characters recoil upon seeing it.
• Black Republican: When the group discusses who's the blackest among them for a sacrifice, Clifton admits to voting for Trump. Twice. To the absolute disgust of the rest of the group, leading to them voting for him as the sacrifice.
• Bond One-Liner: Once the gang has defeated Clifton and pushed him down the well to his death, Dewayne quips, "I guess he's not doing too well."
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: When Clifton arrives, some of the partygoers have a hard time remembering his name, with King bluntly admitting he doesn't know who he is. This leads to Allison pointing out the obvious question: Who invited him? It turned out he invited himself as the Big Bad. He makes Shanika, Lisa, Nnamdi and Dewayne play a game to remember him, and when he mentions the game of Spades they played ten years ago ("I thought I was out on Clubs"), Nnamdi immediately remembers him. Clifton even uses this as his excuse for murdering them since he thinks they ruined his life and didn't even bother to remember, but Lisa points out everyone gets hazed at Spades and it's his own fault for drunk driving after the party. Clifton points out that she accused him of being The Whitest Black Guy which Shanika admits she now remembers as well.
• Character Development:
  • It's discussed that, as would be expected, everyone in the gang has gone through this in the ten years since they were at college together. A couple of standouts are King, who apparently committed some criminal acts in the past and was seen as a "gangsta" by his friends, but is on the straight and narrow in the present day (even if he does have a gun, just for self-defense); and Nnamdi, who was enough of a sleaze that he cheated on Lisa multiple times in college and broke her heart and outright admits to Dewayne at one point that he wasn't a good guy back then, but has reformed enough for her to give him another chance in the present, with him doing his best on multiple occasions to display his commitment to her.
  • The group as a whole gets better about working together and not being so quick to blame each other as the movie goes on. At the film's midpoint, the killer demands that they sacrifice "the blackest" of the group, and they start naming each other as suggestions and everyone feels the need to defend themselves with why it's not them, getting angry and swearing at each other in the process. Compare this with the climax, where the killer again demands that Lisa choose, and she just picks herself and refuses to budge even after he continuously threatens her.
• Chekhov's Gunman: The racist gas station clerk who glares at Shanika when she enters at the beginning of the film. He and his identical twin brother turn out to be part of the family that owns the cabin that the friends are renting, and are the masked killers.
• Comically Small Bribe: A couple times, someone brings up how little money the killers were being paid to kill them.
• Curiosity Killed the Cast: Zigzagged. Morgan and Shawn check out the suddenly closed game room and the extremely racist board game within, but the killer intends to kill them anyway. Ranger White dies due to going off to investigate a noise while trying to help half the group escape. However had he not, it's likely that half of the group who went out into the woods would have died instead without backup.
• Dead All Along: The footage of Morgan being held hostage by the killer and nearly escaping is actually from the previous day. Clifton had already killed her and disposed of her body (along with Shawn's) by the time the rest of her friends arrived at the house.
• Deadly Game: A variation. The characters are playing for Morgan's life rather than their own, though they're threatened with death if they don't play. Subverted that Clifton always intended to kill them and Morgan was Dead All Along.
• Didn't Think This Through: Shanika's idea of swimming across the lake to reach some houses in the distance nearly gets her killed because she's easy for the killer to spot, being the only source of movement or noise on the otherwise calm waters.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The killer's motivation is revenge for the others making fun of him for messing up during a game of Spades. This did lead to him Drowning His Sorrows and killing an innocent woman in a DUI, for which he ended up in prison, but that part's his own fault.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Clifton got incredibly drunk at the Juneteenth party ten years prior due to messing up in a game of Spades.
• Double-Meaning Title: At first glance, the title is a vaguely exploitative parody of "-ing" movie epithets and a remark on the ethnicity of most of the cast. It transpires that it also relates to the subject of "blackness", the purported degrees of which constitute a major factor in the backgrounds of the cast.
• Epic Fail: Allison accidentally stabs herself with the crossbow bolt she pulled out of King's shoulder.
• Everybody Lives: Of the group, the only ones Clifton and the twins manage to kill are Shawn and Morgan the day before everyone else shows up. Of the six of the other friends who arrive later (minus Clifton himself), some of them take serious injuries, but all manage to survive.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Dewayne initially can't stand Nnamdi, due to him cheating on his best friend Lisa back during their college days. In the climax, they trust each other with their lives to take down the killer.
• Flat Character: The twins have no characterization or depth beyond being racist rednecks apparently willing to torment and kill a group of black people for roughly a measly thousand dollars.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In the first scene, Morgan moves a portrait of the family who owns the cabin out of the way, on which can briefly be seen as a pair of twin sons. They're the two masked killers.
  • A twofer: when Shanika stops at a local gas station, the one-eyed redneck clerk immediately gives her a Death Glare (all but outright stated to be because she's black) and starts to head in her direction menacingly, only stopping when another person shows up.
    • This racist clerk and his twin turn out to be the two killers behind the mask, and it's heavily implied that they were willing to take payment to kill the gang just because they're racist and everyone in the group is black.
    • At the time, it seems like the clerk backs off once Clifton arrives because there's now more than one person, but Clifton is smaller and weaker-looking than Shanika, not really someone the man would be intimidated by. The finale reveals that Clifton is the one who hired the twins to kill the friends.
  • Based on dialogue between Lisa, Allison, and Dewayne, there are intended to be eight people at the cabin during the weekend (with Dewayne thinking it's seven because he doesn't know Nnamdi's invited), including Morgan and Shawn. When the group arrives at the cabin, with Shawn and Morgan already missing, it's easy to notice that there are seven people present, indicating that one of them isn't supposed to be there, and several of them openly wonder who invited Clifton to the party, since he's the only one that none of the others knew would be present. He claims that Morgan did, but she's conveniently not there to corroborate this, and considering that she's the one who planned the whole party, you'd think she would have told at least one of the others about him being there and that there would be nine people instead of eight. Naturally, it turns out Clifton is the Big Bad who was never invited at all.
  • The Blackening board game has custom-made pieces for everyone at the party, such as a crown for King and a die for Clifton. Clifton loves board games and made the titular game as part of his twisted mind games against the gang.
    • Clifton is also the first person to suggest going through with playing the game to try to save Morgan, when the others are reluctant and trying to find a way out.
    • When Clifton is unanimously voted by the other six as the one to sacrifice, he angrily points out that turning against each other like this is exactly what the bad guys want them to do, which they later agree with. Except he didn't say this when the whole group was arguing with each other about who the "blackest" one was; he only said it after they stopped arguing and agreed to pick him, because he does want to sow discord among them and is angry that they've united against him instead. And at the climax, when he demands that Lisa choose one of her friends to die and she refuses and picks herself, it indeed does cause him to have a Villainous Breakdown.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: When the killer is giving their Motive Rant, the group points out how weak their motive is, such as noting that everyone gets hazed in Spades, it's just part of the game; that him deciding to drink way too much in response and subsequently killing a woman in a DUI is entirely his own fault; and that going to prison for only four years for vehicular manslaughter is getting off pretty easy.
• Gangsta Style: Nnamdi briefly aims his pistol at the masked killer this way (sideways) before Clifton corrects it and shifts the pistol upright.
• Gender-Equal Ensemble: The group of friends who were supposed to be on the trip to the cabin together would have been this: Four women (Morgan, Lisa, Allison, and Shanika) and four men (Shawn, Dewayne, King, and Nnamdi). Unfortunately for them, three male killers had other plans.
• Hollywood Darkness: More than once, characters act as though it's pitch black in a room even though everyone can be seen easily.
• Hypocrite: Almost every member of the group accuses someone else of "acting white", while being guilty of the same behavior, such as all of them watching Friends.
• Improvised Weapon: When the group is arming themselves, they run out of actual weapons and start using things like a meat tenderizer, a candlestick, and a crossbow bolt.
• Inner Monologue Conversation: Four different times, two or more people hold an entire detailed conversation just by looking at each other.
  • Allison and Lisa mentally talk about Dewayne not knowing that Nnamdi was invited to the cabin on the drive up.
  • Allison and Lisa again share a conversation to strategize during a game of Spades.
  • In the climax, Dewayne shares a mental conversation convincing Lisa to play along with the killer's game because he has a plan.
  • Immediately after, Dewayne shares his plan with Nnamdi, the latter of whom remarks he thought only women could communicate mentally. Unfortunately for them, the killer "overheard" their conversation.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: At the end of the movie, the group calls the fire department because "Firefighters don't shoot anyone". The entire group is immediately blasted with a fire hose.
• Intoxication Ensues: Played for Laughs and Played for Drama.
  • Dewayne getting high on molly early on and starting to strip is either tolerated or laughingly encouraged by his friends. Then when he discovers Lisa and Nnamdi are back together but claims he's okay with it, Shanika promptly asks Lisa for some molly as well because she's "trying to get as fucked up as he is."
  • Allison suddenly feels the Adderall she was given and wanting to "sit there with her feelings" is a major hindrance as they're busy trying to flee the killer. However, it ends up being a boon later when she confronts him since it causes the fight to be a Curb-Stomp Battle in her favor.
• Just Shoot Him: Discussed, but averted. When King takes out the gun to shoot the basement door open, he is asked why he didn't use it before, only for him to point out he had nothing to shoot at before. However, he doesn't have spare bullets with him and runs out to open the door (not to mention the gun gets left behind), leaving it not an option for the rest of the movie. Noticeably, the gun is already unavailable the first time they have close contact with the killer.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: While high on Adderall, Allison goes from completely spaced out and trying to "sit there with her feelings" to basically being Rambo, easily beating and killing the much larger killer with three broken crossbow bolts held between her fingers.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: When half the group wants to stay in the cabin and fight the killer while the other half wants to take their chances fleeing to civilization, Allison says they'll have to split up. Played for Laughs and lampshaded to high hell as she nearly vomits twice while trying to say it, everyone else lambasts the idea and insists you Never Split the Party, and Ranger White instantly comments on it when they fill him in later. It ultimately ends up working out, though, since the killers separate to each go after one of the two trios, giving the friends the chance to gang up on and kill them both individually.
• Made of Iron:
  • Despite having been shot in the shoulder with a crossbow twice, King manages to put up a good fight against the killer until he's stabbed in the leg with another crossbow bolt. Even then, he not only doesn't bleed out from this, but manages to still stay lucid for the rest of the movie.
  • The killer seemingly has no problem walking around even though he got stabbed in the foot by Shanika early in the movie. It's because the killer is actually two men..
  • Allison accidentally stabs herself in the shoulder with a crossbow bolt while removing it from King's shoulder, but puts up the best fight of anyone, managing to kill the masked killer by herself.
• Meaningful Echo: Near the beginning, when Dewayne is upset that Nnamdi was invited to the cabin and Lisa didn't tell him so, she apologizes and tries to convince him it'll still be a great weekend. She asks "Do you trust me?" and he answers "With my life," and she gives him some molly, his drug of choice. They share this same dialogue (mentally) in the climax, but with the lines reversed, when he convinces her to go along with his plan to take down Clifton.
• Mistaken for Racist: Ranger White, who, besides being a white law enforcement officer, is initially suspicious of King because the family he claims to be renting the cabin from usually only rents to families. Once it's proven the group is legit, he apologizes for the misunderstanding and moves on. He later tries to save the party from the killer and proves he isn't racist by insisting "if he was invited to the cookout, he'd be flattered but wouldn't attend because his presence would cause a disturbance and violate their all-black space."
• Moving the Goalposts: One of the questions in the killer's Deadly Game is to list the five black actors who appeared on Friends. When the group managed to answer all five, they were told the correct answer was "I don't know. I don't watch that show."
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: One of the killers is beaten to death so violently that his brains end up covering Lisa.
• Not What It Looks Like: The group finds the killer's mask in Ranger White's jeep, which he insists he found in the woods and that's why he came to check on them. Mere seconds later, he's killed by the actual killer.
• Oh, Crap!: Half the group when they realize the killer is wearing different shoes than before and doesn't have the stab wound Shanika delivered to his foot, because there's more than one.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Zigzagged with the arrows, since it depends on where the victim is shot:
  • One arrow to the throat is indeed enough to kill both Shawn and Ranger White, as one would expect, and Allison kills the first killer by impaling him in the chest with three crossbow bolts; however, everyone else who gets outright shot on any other part of the body ends up surviving it. This includes King taking two crossbow bolts to the shoulder (albeit in the same place), at least one of which goes all the way through, and then having another manually stabbed in his leg by the killer and still soldiering on; Allison accidentally stabbing herself in the shoulder while removing King's and barely being slowed down; the second killer shrugging off an arrow through the hand and in the chest; and Nnamdi also surviving being shot in the shoulder.
  • Also, Shanika stabs the killer right through the foot with a knife, and at worst, this just allows her and the others to successfully close the door on him. He's shown walking around later no problem.
• Platonic Life-Partners: It's eventually made clear that Lisa and Dewayne are ultimately this. The reason he's upset about her getting back with Nnamdi is not because he has romantic feelings for her, since he later explicitly states he's gay, but because it was just out of genuine concern for Lisa as it was Dewayne's shoulder she cried on when Nnamdi cheated on her in the past and he didn't want her to go through that again. By the end, they call each other their best friend and give each other a Platonic Declaration of Love.
• Police Are Useless: Ranger White is the only form of law enforcement shown and while he tries to help, the group's suspicion of him causes him to die before he can do anything. Once everything's over, Dewayne suggests calling the police, only for the entire group to laugh at the idea.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: The villain wears a cartoonish mask resembling a racist depiction of a black person and forces a group of black friends to play a board game with similar imagery which questions their knowledge of black history and culture, then later offers to spare them if they sacrifice the "blackest" of their group. While this is played straight with the redneck twins who spend most of the movie trying to kill them—who took payment to do so apparently just because they're racist assholes—it's subverted with the mastermind, Clifton, who is also black and is actually motivated by revenge on the friend group for razzing him and "revoking his black card" ten years ago due to a mistake during a game of Spades.
• The Power of Trust: The friends trusting each other comes up multiple times and is the reason Everybody Lives as they actually work together against the killer rather than just run off and leave each other to die.
• Pretender Diss: At a previous Juneteenth party ten years earlier, Clifton messed up during a game of Spades and was teased by the group, jokingly saying he wasn’t black. This drove him to drink and drive home intoxicated, killing a pedestrian in the process. Thus, he arranges the entire game out of revenge, bringing his "friends"’ blackness into question in return.
• Punctuated Pounding: Lisa, as she's bashing the killer's brains in with her candlestick. She starts with a And This Is for... on behalf of the murdered Morgan and Shawn, and then the injured King, and it then turns into a rant about "black women needing to save everybody", with her screaming, "I'm tired! I'm so! Fucking! Tired!" as her friends look on in grossed-out awe.
• Red Herring: After Nnamdi drops King's pistol while they're fleeing, the camera noticeably lingers on it, only for the gun to never come up again. It's likely just done to make it clear to the audience that the gang no longer has it and can't Just Shoot Him in their confrontation with the bad guys.
• Relationship-Salvaging Disaster: Platonic and romantic variants. Dewayne ends up in a fight with his friend Lisa over her once again taking back Nnamdi, who cheated on her multiple times when they dated in college. At the same time, Lisa's and Nnamdi's relationship isn't working due to neither genuinely being sure if he's serious. By the end of the movie, Dewayne, Lisa, and Nnamdi all make up and set their differences aside, and the latter two are still together.
• Running Gag: People holding entire conversations with a single look. Taken up to eleven in the climax when the killer listens in on one such conversation.
• Show, Don't Tell: Though the game Spades is surprisingly important and is played onscreen multiple times, the rules are never explained in the slightest. The closest viewers get is how badly the others cringe when they hear Clifton saying that the first time he played, he thought he was "out on clubs", suggesting that's a very obvious mistake.
• Shout-Out:
  • Quite a few different TV series and movies are referenced as part of the titular board game when talking about black characters' and actors' presences in them, like Living Single and Friends during one scene.
  • After Lisa (who wears a yellow outfit during the film) chooses a large candlestick as her Improvised Weapon to fight the killers, Dewayne scoffs at how unlikely it is to be effective, asking if she thinks they're in Clue and calls her "Colonel Mustard".
• Suddenly Shouting: In the middle of their Motive Rant, Clifton shouts half a sentence out of nowhere.
  Killer: The one game I could never get the hang of was Spades because NOBODY PLAYS IT IN VERMONT!
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Downplayed, but the killer none of them isn't a superhuman monster of sort, the main strength is having home-field advantage and some weapons against victims who have none. Once they are lost, however, it's one person against many, and the odds turn out to be pretty bad for the one person. Both twins are put down without much of a fight, the former actually getting a Curb-Stomp Battle from King, only to be saved by a well-timed stab to King's leg, and gets a second, lethal one from Allison right after. The second fares a bit better, but only because Lisa and Nnamdi are put off by the unfamiliar environment. Clifton is the biggest example of them all, being entirely a non-action villain and relying on the crossbow and the threat of explosives, but he is also easily disposed of once deprived of those.
• Taking the Bullet: In the climax, Clifton gets so angry with Lisa refusing to play his game and choosing herself as "the blackest" that he tries to shoot her with the crossbow, only for Nnamdi to protectively step between them and get shot instead. Luckily for him, as with King, it's not fatal.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Lisa caves the second killer's skull in with her big candlestick by beating him with it over and over. It's made quite clear by the blood all over her and her friends' impressed-but-horrified expressions that she hits him many more times than necessary to kill him.
• Token White: Among the heroes, Ranger White is the only white person, and he has a relatively small role before being murdered.
• Unskilled, but Strong: The killer can easily drag a grown woman but has no actual fighting ability when someone manages to fight back, which allows Morgan to overpower him and briefly escape and lets both King and Allison easily overwhelm him.
• Villainous Breakdown: Clifton hates the entire group, but Lisa most of all, since she apparently told him his "black card is revoked" back in college when they were razzing him over messing up at Spades. So in the climax when he's holding four out of the six in the basement (with the other two locked out), Clifton demands that Lisa choose which of her friends present (Nnamdi, Dewayne, or Shanika) is "the blackest", and that person will die first. When she refuses and names herself instead (partially to try to give Dewayne an opening to attack), Clifton starts freaking out and furiously ranting that that's not how the game works.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Shawn, one of the eight members of the friend group who's known each other for ten years since college, dies in the Cold Open, within minutes of first appearing.
• Wham Shot: In the cabin's basement, the group discovers Clifton and Ranger White's bodies, along with a video of someone disposing of Morgan's and Shawn's bodies in the basement well. Then the person turns and is revealed to be Clifton, whose "corpse" promptly stands up.
• What the Hell, Hero?: While trying to determine the "blackest" of the group, Allison furiously calls everyone out for claiming she is, citing that they constantly insist she's the "whitest" because she has a white father, but the moment it becomes convenient, she's suddenly the blackest one present.
• Where da White Women At?:
  • King married a white woman. During his and his friends' argument about who's "the blackest" among them, he tries to use this to claim that it's not him, only to realize thanks to this trope that this actually doesn't help his case and decides to shut up.
  • Gender-inverted with Allison's parents, as she has a black mom and a white dad.
• The Whitest Black Guy: Clifton is held as being the "whitest" of the group, but everyone accuses someone else of this for everything from watching Friends to Allison having a white father.
• World of Action Girls: It's directly lampshaded that, when action is needed the most against the bad guys, the women are the ones who step up and take the most initiative, and all four women in the movie are shown to be Badass Action Survivors.
  • Notably, while the boys do help with the fighting and deal some major injuries to the bad guys, all three of them are fatally injured by the girls.
    • For the twin thug who shoots at Shanika in the woods, King does get some good hits in while trying to defend her, but ends up on the worse end of the fight and pinned to the ground before Allison (who's high on Adderall) pulls a Big Damn Heroes to slash and then impale him with broken arrowheads until he's dead.
    • For the other twin thug who corners Lisa, Dewayne, and Nnamdi at the house, the latter two fight him and Dewayne downs him with a shot, but then Shanika shoots him before he can counterattack, and then Lisa (who took a brutal gut kick) bashes his brains in (well past the point of death) with a candlestick. Also earlier, when he was trying to break out of the basement, Shanika stabbed him in the foot with a knife.
    • When the four friends trapped in the basement with Clifton turn the tables on him, Shanika grabs the crossbow and shoots him in the chest, giving Dewayne an opening to push him to his death down the well.
  • Even Morgan, who gets the least screentime of them, apparently took some martial arts training recently, with which she accidentally socks Shawn in the nose after he startles her from behind. While she does die, she lasted a lot longer than Shawn, and even managed to briefly overpower her captor and escape, only being caught again and killed because she was locked in the cellar and couldn't get out.
• Worst Aid: Lampshaded when the group says they shouldn't pull a crossbow bolt out of King's shoulder, only for the man to do it himself.
• Would Hit a Girl: Gender is no object for the killer (any of them). They drag away Morgan, hold her prisoner, and later murder her; shoot at Shanika while she swims in the lake; deliver a pretty brutal gut kick to Lisa while she, Dewayne, and Nnamdi are fighting them; and, in the climax, makes it clear that Lisa is the one the Big Bad hates and wants to kill most of all.

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