What Makes 'Get Out' A Definitive Horror Movie of Our Time
This is an essay I wrote for my Film Analysis final. Posting here to add to my portfolio.
Get Out, the directorial debut from Jordan Peele, is one of the most widely discussed films to come out of the 2010s. Released in 2017, the combination of its unique cinematic voice and the pre-existing societal fears of the time caused this horror film to connect with critics and audiences alike. Its focus on an African-American perspective and its use of social commentary makes it a very successful horror film for the modern age. Through its innovations in its genre and unique storytelling techniques, Get Out has become one of the most successful horror films of our time.
What makes a horror movie successful is its ability to examine and play on an audience's real life fears within a fictional setting. One of the main attributes of genre films is that they’re a way for filmmakers to explore social anxieties and for audiences to work through those anxieties in an environment where that reflection is safe and encouraged. These social anxieties are constantly changing, which means that “genres develop in a manner that is pertinent to contemporary audiences,” (Doughty & Etherington-Wright 53). The horror genre in particular is a really effective tool for filmmakers to examine these social anxieties. Horror is a genre that’s always been seen as taboo, with the contents of many horror films being seen as “at worst, dangerous, and at best, somewhat disreputable,” (Cherry 12). This genre explores themes that many people think about all the time, but aren’t always acceptable to discuss openly, and the horror genre gives people an outlet to analyze and discuss these themes. A focus on the unknown, the supernatural, brutality, violence, and especially death are all staples of the horror genre, and as the genre has evolved with time and changing tastes in film, those themes have been constant.
Get Out focuses on these themes of death, violence, and the supernatural in a unique and distinctly modern way. The film takes place in 2017 and follows Chris Washington, a photographer and African-American man played by Daniel Kaluuya, who goes with his white girlfriend Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) to meet her parents at their estate in upstate New York. Things seem normal at first, although Chris notices some strange behavior from Rose’s family, and particularly their groundskeeper and maid. As things intensify, with Chris being hypnotized by Rose’s mother Missy and having tense interactions with other characters, he is soon held captive by the Armitages. He learns that the family have been transplanting dying white people’s brains into healthy Black bodies, and that Rose lured him to the house so he could be their next victim. Rose lures Black people to her parents’ home, her mother Missy hypnotizes them and sends them to “The Sunken Place,” and her father Dean and brother Jeremy perform the operations. Chris is ultimately able to defeat all four family members and makes it out of the house alive.
In Get Out, Jordan Peele focuses on themes that horror films are uniquely equipped to handle. Arguably the biggest subgenre of horror on display is that of body horror, stories that focus on the body being transformed in unnatural ways. Peele has cited films that contain body horror as some of his inspirations for Get Out, such as Night of the Living Dead and especially Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Keetley 3). However, Get Out adds an extra layer to this trope by its use of social commentary. As described in The Horror Film: Form & Function, “Horror cinema has always appeared to be rather more flexible and adaptable in its encompassing of the cultural moment, giving scope for filmmakers to encode changing sociocultural concerns with ease,” (Cherry 11), and Peele uses this to its fullest effect. Centering a Black man as the protagonist of the story adds a layer to this commentary as well. Journalist Steven Thrasher described Get Out as “above all a scathing indictment of the on-going theft of the Black body,” (Keetley 5) and an exploration of the continuing legacy of slavery in America. The horror genre is able to discuss these issues through supernatural, horrific plot elements. Peele is able to use the body horror of white people’s brains being implanted in Black people’s bodies to discuss the continued exploitation and lack of agency that Black people have over their own bodies in American society. In her analysis of the film, Dawn Keetley also draws parallels between the Armitages’ procedure, called the Coagula, and the real issue of blackface.
The process of the Coagula is a clear reference to the phenomenon of blackface, which started off as white performers literally painting their faces black for entertainment in the 19th century, and has evolved into white people co-opting Black culture, language, mannerisms, and in turn Black bodies. This is referenced explicitly in the film, when one of the Armitages’ rich white friends tells Chris that, although white people have had more influence for hundreds of years, “Black is back in fashion.” Keetley states that “What drives the narrative of Get Out is the desire of whites to adopt not only ‘blackface’ but a blackness in toto,” (Keetley 7). The idea of implanting a white person’s brain into a Black body is this idea taken to the extreme. Through the use of body horror, Peele is able to examine this need for white people to embody Blackness and the effects that has on our society.
One way that Get Out had such a large impact on audiences was the fact that it explores the fears of both Black and white audience members. By the time Get Out was released in early 2017, Trump had been elected president and much of white Americans’ naivete surrounding racial issues had been shattered, but when the film was in production, there was an idea that during the Obama administration, we were living in a “post-racial” America. A Black man had been elected president, and thus there was no more work needed to be done to fight racism in America. While of course there were still many white people who saw that African-Americans were still oppressed, the post-racial narrative persisted throughout Obama’s entire presidency, and many white people didn’t want to acknowledge that racism was still very prevalent. Jordan Peele set out to challenge the post-racial narrative in this film, telling Time that “If we were in a post-racial society… I would not feel like the token Black guy in a room full of white people trying to connect with me about basketball,” (Berman 108). This film was largely meant as a wake up call for white people, meant to horrify them into realizing that racism didn’t die in 2008.
Of course, what makes Get Out stand out so much from other horror films is its centering of a Black perspective in a largely white genre. Horror, along with Hollywood as a whole, has a long history of being dominated by white filmmakers, and thus is dominated by stories told from white perspectives. Get Out, alongside Peele’s subsequent films, challenge this by focusing on African-American protagonists and playing on African-American fears. Following Chris, a Black man, allows Peele to explore the alienation that so many Black people feel living in a white society and putting that discomfort into a horror setting. Framing these experiences as part of a horror film allows moments like Chris interacting with the rich white guests at the Armitage’s get together to have a sense of tension and discomfort that allows Black audiences members to feel seen and non-Black audience members to understand the experiences of Black people even a little bit better. The film also uses horror to introduce ways for Black people to describe these feelings of alienation in our society, most notably The Sunken Place. This is where Chris is sent to mentally after Missy Armitage hypnotizes him, a manifestation of both Chris’s personal guilt at not preventing his mother’s death as a child and his fractured sense of self. As Mikal J. Gaines explains in Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror, the film connects to W. E. B. Du Bois’ idea of the “double consciousness”, which describes how “being Black in America brings about an internal cracking open of the self, a split that ironically renders it possible to separate questions of subjectivity from those of identity,” (Gaines 161). Get Out and the idea of The Sunken Place translate these ideas to a modern mass audience, giving Black people a way to explain these complex experiences in an easy to understand way. The film also touches on fears of a lack of control of their own body, language, and culture, as discussed earlier through the body horror and blackface parallels found in this film, as well as fears of always being subservient to and oppressed under the white powers that be. While Get Out isn’t the first horror film to focus on Black fears, it was a watershed moment for Black filmmakers in the genre, able to find mass appeal while focusing on issues that a white centered horror film wouldn’t be able to address.
Overall, Get Out is a massively successful horror film, both in terms of connecting with audiences and critics, and conveying the ideas it wants to address. Jordan Peele uses a combination of social commentary and horror elements to discuss the fears of living in 21st century America as a Black person and to dispel the post-racial myth that was so prevalent in the 2010s. It’s easy to see why Get Out has become a landmark in the horror genre and 21st century cinema in general over the past 7 years. It’s an expert example of horror filmmakers using the audience's fears to convey important messages, adapt a genre for a modern audience, and tell an engaging story.