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“Get Out” True Horror, Turned Horror Film

A $4.5 million budget somehow was able to make former comedy writer and comedian Jordan Peele into a well-respected, Oscar-nominated horror filmmaker. Get Out has grossed over 255 million worldwide which is a massive profit considering its small budget (Wilkinson). But what could have possibly made Get Out succeed so much as a horror movie such as the likes of “The Conjuring” and “The Blair Witch Project.” The issue with Horror films is that audiences seem to have gotten bored of the traditional jump scare horror flick. Every film seems to be more based on the formula of eerie music and jump scares than the one that came before. But how come this low budget film was different? Jordan Peele takes a very different approach to horror than many directors and writers of the Genre. Peele takes the approach of taking something real and transforming it into a fictional horror story (Landsberg, 630). The real horror in Peele’s 2017 blockbuster was its themes surrounding racism.

This film was able to take a real hot topic in America (especially since the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency causing racial tensions to rise in the country) and use a narrative to show people the real horrors of something like racism. Get Out is a film about a young black man in his 20’s named Chris who is dating a white girl named Rose Armitage, who comes from a wealthy family who lives in a rich white neighborhood. Their house is isolated and there isn’t another house in close proximity. Rose’s family are elite white liberals who apparently want to show their approval of their daughter dating a black man. The first few interactions are filled with multiple micro aggressions such as Rose’s father showing Chris a picture of his father who lost an Olympic race to Jesse Owens, a black Olympic gold medalist, who won a gold medal in Germany in front of Hitler. He also went on to say that if he could vote for Obama for a third term then he would because he was the best president of his life time by far. These are all is if the family is trying to blatantly say: “WE’RE NOT RACISTS.”

This is a common theme with white liberals in today’s society with people constantly trying to defend their biases through their obscure connections and support of black people or people of marginalized identities. You can see through Chris’ facial expressions that he is not surprised that people are acting this way around him and its almost as if he finds this to be something comical. Chris starts to become suspicious as he realizes that there is nothing but white people around when the Armitage family throws their annual party. Everyone is a white affluent person other than the two black servants that work for the Armitage’s. There seems to be something off about the two servants as if they are living in someone else’s body. It’s at the climax of the film that Chris realizes that something odd is going on at this place. Once we see another black person at the party it is clear that something is odd about this person. Chris tries to connect with him on a level that connects them on the basis of black culture. However, when Chris recognizes him as someone, he used to know who has gone missing and tries to take a picture with flash to which this person (old acquaintance Andre Hayworth) nose starts to bleed and he starts to desperately yell “Get Out” to Chris (hence we get the name of the film) As if he was trying to warn Chris that this was not a place that he wanted to be in. Rose’s mom is able to calm Andre down, but Chris decides to take a walk and to tell Rose that he wants to leave to which she agrees. When Chris is gathering his stuff, he stumbles upon a box of photos of Rose with other black men and even a woman who looks like Gorgina (one of the family servants).

Through this Chris realizes that he must live but not before he is ambushed by the family and is basically explained that these white people who came to the Armitage’s house, were there to bid on Chris’s body. For a multitude of reasons, we see that these people are fetishizing these black bodies so that their consciousness could be transferred into a black vessel. This is the horror of the film (Virtue). No matter how nice these white people seem, there is always something that makes them look at you in a different light. When Marketing this film, Peele Insured that people knew that this film would address racism.

When the original trailer of the film was released, it received about 66 million views which is three times as many as a regular horror film trailer usually gets (Marich). This was mainly through people sharing the clip because its subject matter was different than anybody had ever seen before. As the video continued circulating, more and more people were intrigued by the film and the subject matter. How could you take something as real as racism and make it into a horror film? 

That’s exactly what made this film something that people were dying to see. Posters continued to be released with text saying things like: “do you belong in this neighborhood?” 

and from this, fans started to create their own fan art posters that mimicked what was being done by Peele and Blumhouse (Marich).

Reception from audiences was overwhelmingly positive. People loved “Get Out.” And people started to recognize the genius of Jordan Peele. He was more than just a comedy writer, he was a writer and director that could take true horror and make it into a big-screen blockbuster that brought real issues to people’s attention (Virtue). The critic's consensus from Rotten Tomatoes says Get Out is: “Funny, scary, and thought-provoking, Get Out seamlessly weaves its trenchant social critiques into a brilliantly effective and entertaining horror/comedy thrill ride.”

In Lizzy Human’s Article “Fetishism of the Black Body in Get Out.” She points out how one of the main points in this film revolve around stereotypes surrounding black bodies. In the movie it is pointed out multiple times that black people are more physically gifted than white people when it comes to athletic ability, strength, and aging black bodies are just better. In this sense, these people are just creating their own fetish about what the advantages are to being black (Human, 1). This plays on the issues surrounding white people stereotyping black people. This is something we often see in sports where people think that black people are better at some sports because there is something genetically that gives them an advantage. This is the type of thing that some people focus on instead of what it is actually like to be black in today’s society with all of the oppression and marginalization that hurts black people, white people are just focused on what black people might physically have that they don’t.

The success of this film is based on how Jordan Peele was able to take a real-life horror and turn into a successful film in the horror genre. This is known as “Horror Vérité” or “True Horror.” In this case, the true horror that Peele uses in the film “Get Out” is the horror of racism in today’s society. When people think of racism towards black bodies, they often think of slavery or the civil rights era where black people needed to fight for the right to be considered regular people. However, Peele’s film Speaks about the Racism that Black people face today, where they are still seen differently as a result of the color of their skin (Landsberg 631). This film starts this horror off by conveying how elite white liberals constantly try to justify their lack of racism through several microaggressions such as saying things like Rose’s Father saying that he “would have voted for Obama for a third term if he could have” or Rose’s brother saying things like Chris would have an unfair advantage in MMA because of his “genetic makeup” claiming that black people have some sort of unfair advantage over white people, basically ignoring the centuries of oppression by white people who claimed that they were a superior race and species.

“Get Out” was a revolutionary film that turned the Horror Genre on its head (Bishop). it was able to take the true horror of racism and create a world that was truly terrifying and made black people feel seen and was able to tell a story in a brilliant way thanks to Jordan Peele, who is more than just a comedy sketch writer. 

Bishop, Bryan. “Get Out Director Jordan Peele Wants to Change People's Minds with Horror Movies.” The Verge, The Verge, 2 Mar. 2017, www.theverge.com/2017/3/2/14781308/get-out-jordan-peele-horror-movie-race-interview.

Human, Lizzy. “Fetishism of the Black Body in Get Out .” Literary Cultures Nottingham Trent University, vol. 2, 2017, pp. 1–2. This source talks about how Jordan Peele created this film not on the basis of common racism as we know it but more on the fetish of black bodies from the antagonists in this film which are the white "open-minded" liberal elite family the Armitage’s. This is what makes this film a horror, it's that these white antagonists crave and need the bodies of innocent black people for various reasons which is what creates the horror for the protagonist.

Landsberg, Alison. “Horror Vérité: Politics and History in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017).” Continuum, vol. 32, no. 5, 2018, pp. 629–642., doi:10.1080/10304312.2018.1500522.

Marich, Robert. “'Get Out' Marketing Tapped Into Relationship Between Racism and Horror.” Variety, 22 Mar. 2017, variety.com/2017/biz/news/jordan-peele-get-out-marketing-racism-horror-1202012833/. This source from Variety talks about the initial marketing of the film Written and Directed by Jordan Peele and how since this film spent about 4.5 million dollars, and made over 33 million on opening weekend. Peele and Blumhouse Studios pushed peoples buttons by deciding to tell people that this was a horror film based in racism which piqued curiosity, I also believe that the way this article speaks about the promotion of the film through social media by fans truly helped it as well

Nguyen, Olivia Bé “How Get Out, the First Great Movie of the Trump Era, Got Made.” Vulture, 22 Feb. 2018, www.vulture.com/2018/02/making-get-out-jordan-peele.html. This article from Vulture talks about how Get Out was a movie that was made in criticism of the post-racial era of Obama and how the Presidency of Donald Trump allowed Peele to make this movie, taking the real horrors of racism and creating it into a horror film. I think that this source can help me take a look at the politically charged reasons for this film being made and help me start to look into how people looked at this film from a political standpoint after its release.

Poll, Ryan. “Can One ‘Get Out?" The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 51, no. 2, 2018, pp. 69–102. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/45151156.

Virtue, Graeme. “Is Get Out a Horror Film, a Comedy ... or a Documentary?” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 17 Nov. 2017, www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2017/nov/17/get-out-golden-globes-race-horror-comedy-documentary-jordan-peele.

Wilkinson, Alissa. “Get Out Is a Horror Film about Benevolent Racism. It's Spine-Chilling.” Vox, Vox, 25 Feb. 2017, www.vox.com/culture/2017/2/24/14698632/get-out-review-jordan-peele.