Getting in to Get Out

Jordan Peele's directorial debut Get Out (2017) made quite a splash when it came out in February. It grossed $175m at the box office, ranking #9 so far this year. That's quite a feat for a non-franchise independent horror flick. It's also a rarity because it is a horror movie viewed through an African-American lens.

African-American actors have appeared infrequently in lead roles in the genre- perhaps most famously in "late of late" George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). There were a couple Blaxpoitation horror flicks like Blacula (1972) and the hysterical Exorcist rip-off Abby (1974). Will Smith became the last man on earth amidst a horde of undead New Yorkers in I am Legend (2007).  But in general, there aren't alot of horror movies directed by Black artists that use the social anxiety tropes of the genre to focus on Black lives. With Get Out's success, that may change.

Chris (the teary-eyed Daniel Kaluuya) takes a trip with his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams in all her post-racial glory) to meet her parents in their familial home on an idyllic country estate. One would think this is a set-up for a modern Who's Coming to Dinner?. It's really not. The first scene of the film features the mysterious assault and kidnapping of a young Black man who happens into the wrong neighborhood to the haunting strains of WWII ditty "Run Rabbit Run."

Then Chris and Allison's drive is interrupted by a gruesome deer collision, so it is clear there is more than an awkward dinner awaiting Chris. I hesitate to go into much more plot detail because the movie has some great surprises. Instead, I'm going to discuss how Get Out is connected to classic films- because it's what I do.

The two films critics have mentioned the most are Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Stepford Wives (1975)- and they are spot on. The Black folk at the Armitage House are creepy racial versions of the wives of Stepford. When Georgina and Andrew speak of their happiness (the hair-raisingly excellent Betty Gabriel and Lakeith Stanfield) there is a smooth, manufactured quality that while not mechanical like Nanette Newman's recipe breakdown, has the same inhuman impact.

The upper crust elder community that comes to the annual garden party could be right out of the Castavet living room in Rosemary's Baby, and the soundtrack tips a fiendish hat to a satanic chorus that must miss the work since the Damien TV series flopped.

But these are just cosmetic similarities. What Get Out does is cleverly adapt the themes of these two earlier works (and other Female Gothic films) from questioning and stylizinging cultural gender issues to racial ones. The poised wives of Stepford were the perfectly outfitted, coiffed, and submissive images that women were burning their bras about during the Feminist Movement.

Get Out projects the placid image of Blacks as inoffensive, servile, and complacent- at once both horribly outdated, and for some, completely expected in a post-Obama world. Allison's dad keeps saying how he would vote for Obama a third time. The attitude is White people have fully accepted Blacks- so we must be beyond racial issues, right? Nope.

As in Stepford, Peele makes this regressive image uncomfortable- a version of Blackness that just wants to get along- that doesn't rock the boat- assimilated into instead of being part of. It's an aesthetically pleasing image that struggles to hide what's wrong with it. And that's what creeps us the fuck out about it.

Peele astutely makes his hero a photographer- as is Katharine Ross' character in Stepford. They are artists viewing and recording their twisted world- which in the tradition of horror- is often a reflection of our real one.