(Insert Scary Movie Here)

Hello, Internet.

About two years ago, a friend of mine called me up (or, more likely, texted me) to ask if I wanted to go see a movie. The movie she had in mind wasn’t one I knew much about, except that it was a horror film, it was directed by comedian Jordan Peele, and it was called Get Out.

For the first half of the movie, I was completely enthralled – and horrified. Somewhere towards the latter half I lost track of the plot, not really comprehending the events that rapidly spiralled out on the screen.

Get Out stayed in my peripheral vision in the following years; I heard that it did well, and that Jordan Peele since directed another horror film called Us, but I didn’t think about it too much otherwise.

It was called back to the forefront of my attention last week when we watched it in class, and this time I was much less confused – but just as enthralled.

The setup for Get Out is this: an African American man, Chris, and his white girlfriend, Rose, are planning to visit Rose’s parents for the weekend. Her parents don’t know that Chris is black, as Rose claims it won’t be a big deal because they aren’t racist. Chris is wary, but he agrees to go meet them for the weekend anyways, and so the two set out on their way.

Before any of this happens, however, the movie opens with a seemingly unrelated scene. We see a man walking alone at night. He’s black, fairly young, making his way down a suburban street. He’s clearly uncomfortable, muttering out loud that the area is “a hedge maze”, and saying in a conversation over the phone that it’s “creepy”. A car slows down, apparently following him. Noticing this, he turns around and starts walking in the opposite direction, proclaiming aloud, “Not me. Not today.” He checks behind him to see if the car has turned as well. It hasn’t.

Instead, it’s completely stopped, doors open, Run Rabbit Run playing on the radio. A man in a mask appears, strangles the first man until he stops struggling, shoves him in the trunk of the car, gets in, and drives away.

This scene, like the rest of the movie, is informed by current American events. The man walking is uncomfortable even before the car slows down and starts following him, and not without reason. Suburbs like the one he’s walking through are often predominantly white, and it’s not uncommon for black men to be reported to the police, injured, or killed by racist white people who see them as a threat – like in the case of Trayvon Martin, a seventeen year old fatally shot for, it seems, being a black man in a suburban neighbourhood. Unlike in other horror films,where the suburbs are seen as a safe place being encroached upon by killers, here the suburbs themselves, and the regular inhabitants thereof, present the danger.

As the car drives away, the sound of Run Rabbit Run fades out, and a few string chords take its place as the scene transitions to the title sequence: shots of the forest along the road to Rose’s parents house, accompanied by a Swahili song called Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga. The lyrics, translated to English, are as follows:

Brother,

Listen to the ancestors.

Run!

You need to run far! (Listen to the truth)

Brother,

Listen to the ancestors

Run! Run!

To save yourself,

Listen to the ancestors.

They seem to be encouraging the listener to do the same thing as the movie’s title: get out. However, the eerie music is quickly replaced as the title sequence ends. This time, Childish Gambino’s Redbone plays as we are finally introduced to Chris, Rose, and their prospective road trip. The song’s hook of “stay woke” seems to be both another warning that something dangerous is going to happen, and an ironic nod to the non- nblack people throughout the movie who think that they’re being “woke” while actually mistreating Chris.

So, Chris and Rose are driving to Rose’s parents house and they hit a deer. They pull over, and Chris gets out to take a look at the dying deer, lying a few feet off the road. He looks at it; it looks back at him. They seem to have a moment of solidarity.

Cut to a policeman standing by the car, telling Rose to call animal services in the future, not the police. Rose apologizes, and then the policeman turns his attention to Chris, and asks to see his driver’s licence. Rose protests, saying Chris wasn’t driving, while Chris attempts to politely comply with the police officer. Eventually, Rose gets the policeman to back down and drive away, and Rose and Chris continue driving.

This is another scene that very blatantly comments on a major issue in America: racial profiling. Police will wrongly stop, accuse, hurt, or kill people of colour (usually black people) without proper cause, often not facing serious consequences.


Once they’ve reached Rose’s parents’ house, we are introduced to her father, Dean, and her mother, Missy, and quickly learn that the rest of Rose’s relatives are going to be there for the weekend as well. At the same time, we meet Walter (the groundskeeper) and Georgina (the maid), both black. Both of them act strange throughout the day, speaking and dressing very formally, and in a style reminiscent of the 1950s.

We learn that Dean is a neurosurgeon, and Missy is a hypnotist, who later hypnotizes Chris to get him to stop smoking. While he is hypnotized, we learn that his mother was killed in a car accident when he was a child, as he sat at home watching TV.

Chris has various conversations with Dean and Missy, as well as Rose’s brother Jeremy, who arrives that night. All three of them appear initially to be, as Rose said, not racist, but through a series of microaggressions it quickly becomes apparent that they aren’t as progressive as they think. Chris has a similar experience with Rose’s extended family, with many of her relatives fixating on the fact that he is black, and making insensitive comments. Eventually, Chris finds the one other black man there (save for Walter). His name is Logan, and like Walter and Georgina, he speaks formally and dresses in outdated clothes – including a hat reminiscent of the one worn by Emmett Till in this well known photo of him.

Chris, a photographer, snaps a photo of Logan with his phone, not realizing the flash is on. When it goes off, Logan suddenly freaks out, grabbing Chris and yelling at him to “get out”. He is led away by some other relatives, then comes back, calm again, and apologizes, saying he had a seizure. Chris and Rose go for a walk, while Dean leads the other relatives in a game of bingo that is eerily reminiscent of a slave auction. Chris decides he wants to go home because he is feeling creeped out, and Rose agrees to go with him. Meanwhile, Chris sends a picture of Logan to his friend Rod, saying he recognized him, and Rod identifies Logan as being a man named Andre who disappeared a few months earlier.

Chris and Rose are packing up to leave when Chris finds a box in the closet with a stack of photos of Rose with different black guys, generally looking to be ex boyfriends, despite the fact that she had told him he was the first black man she had dated. Chris becomes more urgent to leave, but Rose can’t find the car keys – and then it’s revealed that she actually has them, but isn’t willing to give them to him. She and her family stop Chris from leaving, knock him out, and he awakes tied to a chair, watching a TV.

On the TV, a man explains that the family has invented a procedure called the Coagula: a way for someone’s consciousness to be transferred into another body, while keeping that body’s original consciousness dormant. The family has been abducting young black people and transferring the consciousnesses of elderly members of the family into the younger bodies to preserve them. Walter, Georgina, and Logan – who is actually the man we saw kidnapped at the start – are all elderly members of Rose’s family inhabiting young, black bodies. While the reason given for them using specifically black people is that members of the family thought they would be cooler or stronger, it would also be easier for them, as things like the abduction in the first scene go more easily unreported than if a white person went missing in the same spot.

Chris is repeatedly knocked out through the use of the sound and image of a spoon clinking in a teacup, which Missy used to hypnotize him. He escapes by putting cotton in his ears, and fighting the family members one on one, until he has killed all of them except Rose, who is upstairs. She hears the commotion, and comes downstairs with a rifle, attempting to kill him. He gets in Jeremy’s car (the same car from the beginning of the film) and tries to drive away, but he hits Georgina and, feeling guilty about not having saved his mother as a child, decides he can’t leave her. He puts her unconscious body in the passenger seat, and she wakes up and attacks him. He fights her off, and is still pursued by Rose and Walter, when he uses the flash on his phone to bring Walter back to his senses, at which point Walter shoots Rose and then himself. However, Rose is still alive, and as Chris is attempting to kill her before she kills him, a police car pulls up. It seems that Chris is going to be killed by the police.

It turns out that the driver of the police car is Chris’s friend Rod, a TSA agent, who has been piecing the whole thing together based on what Chris has told him. The two drive off to safety, and the film closes.

While I was writing this post, I pulled up a copy of the film’s script, which had a few differences to the actual film, most notably in the opening scene and at the very end. Instead of just focusing on Andre walking alone at the start, the scene is interspersed with scenes of a white family preparing to go to DisneyWorld:

A perfect suburban house with bay windows and a front lawn. The SHAW family. Caucasian and warm – RICHARD, 34; NANCY, 30; JOSHUA, 6; and MAY, 4 – eat dinner inside. Richard reads something on his tablet illuminating his face.

JOSHUA: Which one are we going to?

RICHARD: The one in Orlando.

NANCY Disney World.

JOSHUA: Tony said that Mickey is not really Mickey; it’s someone else in there.

RICHARD: Mickey’s Mickey.

JOSHUA: Tony said Mickey’s face doesn’t move.

RICHARD: That’s right. Mickey’s always happy.

EXT. SUBURBAN STREET – CONTINUOUS The driver carries Andre to the car.

JOSHUA (O.S.): Why?

RICHARD (O.S.): Because he hasn’t aged in 100 years.

It’s chilling. Then and again, pretty much everything in this film is chilling, as it conveys a very present fear: racism in America, specifically internalized racism by people who claim to be “woke”. Much of the tension throughout the film is built up through examples of everyday racism, until it’s eventually revealed that everything is part of a bigger, more sinister operation.

As for the end of the film, the script has the whole police-showing-up thing played much more grimly, ending with Chris getting arrested and going to prison, as Rod still searches for evidence of what really happened. Chris, however, is happy knowing that he was able to defeat Rose and her family.

Get Out is a modern and innovative film, but it still has similarities to the roots of horror. Like in Frankenstein, it shows someone being outcast by society for the way they look – and, in the original ending of the film, Chris is literally penalized for killing the people who were attacking him, much like Frankenstein vows revenge on his creature for his actions. They have similarities from a science fiction angle too, with the horror of someone playing God and essentially controlling the body of another person, via reanimation in Frankenstein and the coagula in Get Out.

Overall, Get Out was an excellent and creepy film that I really enjoyed watching, even if it took me a couple tries to fully understand the plot.

Anyways, until next time –

Toodles.

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