Get Out looks behind the fears of racism and delivers a true horror film
One of the central images in Ava DuVernay’s 13th comes from the seminal 1915 Civil War film The Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith. An overwhelmingly racist production that casts the Ku Klux Klan as heroes, The Birth of a Nation is also responsible for one of the great cultural myths of our times.
13th returns again and again to the image of the black man as the rapist, the criminal, the danger in the night that comes for young and innocent white women to take them from their homes and end their lives.
So powerful was this image, 13th claims, that it encouraged undue attention from law enforcement and led to the routine lynching throughout entire generations in the Jim Crow South.
This racial fear hasn’t faded—ask anyone who has ever crossed the street to avoid passing a black man on their side or locked their car doors while driving down Martin Luther King Blvd.
But every action has an equal, opposite reaction, and while white people reacted to these alternative facts about black men, they created a different, more real fear in the black community—the fear of white people in large groups.
Truth be told, one white person during the Jim Crow era could inflict their own tyranny on any black person they came across, but together, they could kill almost indiscriminately. These fears weren’t unfounded rumors—another powerful part of 13th is its use of period photographs and film footage that proves that it happened, and often.
Get Out, a horror film by Jordan Peele, does what all horror films do. It takes a deep seated fear and creates a narrative around it. What makes it unique, however, is how it gives a voice to a fear that most people have never considered.
Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is a photographer in New York City with a new girlfriend named Rose (Alison Williams). We meet him as he is packing for a weekend at her parent’s home. We learn that Rose hasn’t mentioned to her family that her new boyfriend is black, a first for her. Rose assures Chris that it doesn’t matter because her parents aren’t racist—her father even voted for Obama twice and would vote for him a third time.
Chris, who has encountered these defenses his entire life, internally rolls his eyes and the two are off, far into the wilderness where her parents live in absolute privacy. Her father, it seems, is a neurosurgeon and her mother is a psychiatrist. She has a brother in school, studying to be a surgeon like his father.
The first thing Chris notices when they arrive is that Rose’s parents employ a groundskeeper and maid, both black. Her father explains that he initially hired them to care for his aging parents, and when they passed, he couldn’t bear to let them go. They had become family, he insists.
It’s not really their presence that is unnerving, though. It’s their behavior, their mannerisms, their speech—the things that make them who they are. For lack of a better description, they seem, well, white. As the weekend goes on, the situation becomes stranger and stranger.
While Get Out is certainly racially themed, it’s accessible for a wide audience due to playing on yet another deep seated fear—isolation among strangers. For the socially awkward, spending an entire weekend with another person’s family is terrifying in and of itself. Everything is different, every interaction seems forced, and everyone is on guard.
There are themes of class present as well—Rose’s parents are obviously wealthy, which is its own form of isolation when considering the character of Chris, a young man who lost his mother and guardian at the age of eleven.
The rich are as different from the poor as white is from black. Adding the racial themes to the mix only serves to heighten the anxiety and create the atmosphere of danger.
Get Out does not rely on the jump scares or gore that so often plagues the horror genre. Instead, like most smart films in the genre, it relies on the atmosphere, and provides it in spades. The world of the white man is clean, bright, and manicured. It isn’t what lurks in the dark corners of an old house that’s frightening. It’s what lurks in the dark mind of the man smiling in your face.