This paper provides an in-depth literature review of the Black Hole Algorithm (BHA) which is considered as a recent metaheuristic. BHA has been proven to be very efficient in different applications. There has been several modifications and variants of this algorithm in the literature, so this work reviews various variants of the BHA. The applications of BHA in engineering problems, clustering, task scheduling, image processing, etc. have been thoroughly reviewed as well. This review article sheds lights on the pros and cons of this algorithm and enables finding a right variant of this algorithm for a certain application area. The paper concludes with an in-depth future direction.