The pinnacle of modern American horror.

On the eve of Get Out, Jordan Peele’s 2017 horror movie about a black man meeting his white girlfriend’s family, Hollywood was in the midst of a horror renaissance. Fright flicks were scarier, artsier, and more culturally responsive than anything America had seen since the slasher era of the 1980s, maybe even the paranoid, frantic, catharsis-free 1970s. Thanks to a wave of visionary young directors, a surge in counterprogramming to mainstream blockbusters, and one of the most anxiety-inducing time periods in recent history, horror movies were in high demand and high-quality supply. Get Out is the high watermark of them all.

While big-time Hollywood studios like Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. were building cinematic universes and IP-driven franchises, a vacuum opened in the market for small-budget, low-risk productions that could make a quick buck. Independent production companies tried to attract audiences with many different kinds of movies, but early in the 2010s, once-bankable genres like adult comedies or animated family films were hit-or-miss at best, financially disastrous at worst. The one category that spawned consistent hits was horror.

One of the first major box-office successes of this stretch was 2013’s The Conjuring, a throwback haunted-house movie from genre veteran James Wan[1]. The Conjuring didn’t traffic in wildly different territory than classics like Poltergeist or The Exorcist, but it featured some impressive practical effects, first-rate performances, and a few modern filmmaking flourishes (extended takes, limited-but-effective CG work) that made it feel a tiny bit prestigious and really, really scary. For its producers at New Line Cinema and its distributors at Warner Bros., The Conjuring was one of the most profitable ventures of the decade. On just a $20 million budget, it pulled a first-place, $41 million opening weekend, an ultimate domestic gross totaling $137 million, and a worldwide gross nearing $320 million. With no big names to boast and not a ton of money on screen, it was clear the appeal of The Conjuring was the genre. The horror resurgence was on.

Though the top tier of Hollywood producers certainly cashed in on the scares—The Conjuring and It are the two biggest horror hits of the decade, and both come from New Line Cinema[2]—horror became a surefire way for smaller production companies to establish themselves and find an in with major distributors. Sometimes, these underdogs would scrape their way to the big-time through the name of a down-and-out or thumb-twiddling director, like when M. Night Shyamalan began his comeback with The Visit in 2015 or when Joss Whedon wrote Cabin in the Woods in 2012 (Whedon’s first script since 2005). Other times, studios would take a chance on a lesser-known name and run with a compelling concept: You’re Next, an inversion of the home invasion thriller, was Adam Wingard’s directorial breakout[3], and 2014’s The Babadook gave Australian director Jennifer Kent her feature debut and a blank check to do just about whatever she wanted[4].

Other studios built themselves primarily on the low-budget horror model. Arthouse studio A24, for instance, has broader aspirations than horror, but its most notable movies to date are squarely in the scaring business. Since their first feature release in 2013, they’ve put out acclaimed shockers like Enemy[5], Under the Skin[6], The Witch[7], It Comes at Night[8], Hereditary[9], and Midsommar[10].

It was Blumhouse Productions, however, that really moneyballed[11] the horror genre into a lucrative business model in the 2010s. Founder Jason Blum still operates the studio on a simple premise: Never spend more than $5 million on a movie, and choose projects with known commodities, be it their premise, genre, or talent.

Blumhouse had its first hit in 2009 with Paranormal Activity, the seismic and trend-reviving found-footage movie that cost $15,000 to make and earned $193 million at the box office. They’d go on to finance Insidious ($1.5 million budget, $97 million earnings), Sinister ($3 million, $87 million), The Purge ($3 million, $89 million), Whiplash[12] ($3 million, $49 million), Ouija ($5 million, $103 million), and The Visit ($5 million, $99 million)[13]. A whole bunch of those movies spawned just-as-profitable sequels, a few whole franchises of their own.

And just as Blumhouse reached the crest of the horror wave in 2017, they released Get Out. The movie cost $4.5 million and made $255 million, cementing quotes and images in the cultural lexicon and picking up four Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture. Horror movies had been making impressions for years, but Get Out was particularly impactful. It reminded Hollywood of an audience starving for representation, touched upon sensitive American anxieties, and wove a litany of bruising commentaries and skin-picking messages into the fabric of one of the most entertaining, fun-to-watch, holler-at-the-screen movies to come along in years. By all accounts an unlikely underdog movie, Get Out is nonetheless one of the closest things we have to a modern classic.

Get Out’s prescience was born of a comfortable time. During the movie’s production in 2015 and early 2016, the United States was in the twilight of the Obama years, drowsy under a sense of pre-election progressive security. Before the 2016 primaries brought tensions to the surface, everything was just fine in liberal America. There was a black president in the White House, a slate of new progressive legislature being signed into law, and a general national attitude of self-satisfaction. The good guys had won and by all accounts were going to keep winning. All was well.

At least, that’s how the left saw it. Right-leaning America would have told you a different story, and if you paid attention to the horror movies of the mid-decade, you might have seen the boundaries of the left’s contentment. Well before the 2016 election brought Middle America’s frustrations to the surface of popular thought, movies like You’re Next, Don’t Breathe, The Guest, The Visit, and It Follows were picking at the discontent of the conservative working-class.

These movies manifested their themes by shifting traditional scary-movie power dynamics. You’re Next, Don’t Breathe, and The Guest show small-town Americans—typically the victims in slasher movies—turn the tables on their predators, who often underestimated their mark’s resilience. Meanwhile, The Visit and It Follows depicted young people in working-class suburbs struggling against evil legacies they didn’t ask for and couldn’t have prevented. You don’t need a degree in political science to see the parallels here. The settings of all these movies underscored their ideas, too: Detroit (Don’t Breathe), Missouri (You’re Next), working-class Oakland (It Follows), and rural Pennsylvania (The Visit).

So on the eve of Get Out, American horror had halfway returned to the tradition of the late-1960s social thriller (think movies like Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary’s Baby[14]), in which the zombies, demons, or monsters stood in for the true villain: society. But up to that point, modern horror hadn’t made its commentaries mainstream, and Get Out was only able to do so because, perhaps, it looked like a movie that was going to affirm its audience rather than critique it.

Get Out’s elevated concepts are founded in a simple premise: A black man meets his white girlfriend’s family. It’s a natural elevator pitch for the movie’s writer and director, Jordan Peele, best known to this point for his work on Comedy Central’s sketch show Key and Peele throughout the first half of the decade. Peele and comedy partner Keegan-Michael Key garnered critical acclaim and major cultural capital by using their show to analyze the intersection of race, culture, and comedy. Across five seasons, they won two Emmys out of 18 nominations and earned a Peabody Award, sort of like the Pulitzer of Hollywood[15].

Horror might seem like a strange post-comedy swerve for Peele, but he asserts comedy was an apt primer for his film career. Both comedy and horror deal with building and releasing tension, Peele has argued, the main difference being one release of that tension brings a laugh and the other makes you jump. In both cases, the artist is creating a surprise.

Peele was inspired to write Get Out from both the identity politics of the 2008 Democratic Primary and Eddie Murphy’s “Get Out the House” bit from Murphy’s 1983 special Delirious[16]. In the primary, Obama and Clinton solidified their bases via sometimes blatantly playing the race card or the gender card, and in Delirious, Murphy says black people don’t star in horror movies because black people would just leave as soon as they saw a ghost in the house. Peele saw a connection.

Forty drafts later (!), Peele had Get Out, a movie written in the Obama years, meant for the Hillary years, and to everyone’s surprise, released in the Trump years. Even still, somehow, the movie’s timing couldn’t have been more perfect.

Get Out centers on a young black man named Chris[17]. This is already unusual given the “black guy dies first” horror stereotype, but Chris makes his first appearance in this movie to Childish Gambino’s “Redbone” on the soundtrack, which contains the chorus: “Stay woke!” It’s a signal. Chris isn’t going to be a dumb horror protagonist. He’s going to be smart, cautious, and proactive. He’s woke[18].

Before Get Out reveals its horrors, however, Chris must navigate the subtler tensions of meeting the Armitage family: the mother, father, and brother of his girlfriend Rose[19]. The Armitages don’t threaten Chris outright, per se, but they demonstrate an excruciating ignorance that’s largely uncomfortable for how familiar it is. For example, Rose’s dad Dean, played by Bradley Whitford, tells Chris (without prompting) he would’ve voted for Obama for a third term, and is quick to show him souvenirs he brought back from a trip to Bali. Other interactions with the family objectify Chris directly. Rose’s brother Jeremy calls Chris a “beast” and asks him numerous loaded questions about the physical advantages he might have had in sports growing up. Most disconcerting of all, the Armitages introduce Chris to the family help: a black housekeeper named Georgina and a black groundskeeper named Walter. Throughout their introductory sequence, the family calls attention to Chris’ blackness by making obvious efforts to skirt around it.

Peele has explained Get Out was written in response to what he calls Obama’s “post-racial America,” a reference to the nation’s perception that it was past racism upon Obama’s election in 2008. This national consciousness (or unconsciousness, as it were) can be attributed to both conservatives and liberals, but the mechanisms of Get Out are specifically designed to expose post-racial attitudes on the left. The Armitages behave the way they do around Chris because they’re eager to demonstrate how progressive they are, while in fact, this eagerness reveals an arrogance that in itself is racist. For his part, Chris is bemused by his hosts—their ignorance is harmless compared to the open hostility he might experience elsewhere—but his tolerance dissipates in the movie’s second half when the family’s demonstrations become more, shall we say, aggressive.

Get Out’s most famous scene—and one of the decade’s most famous scenes, period—is when Chris is hypnotized by Rose’s mother and trapped in “the sunken place.” The sunken place is Get Out’s most important concept. In this scene, Missy traps Chris within his worst fears. He can sense everything happening around him, but he can’t move or speak[20]. Just as significant, when he comes out of the sunken place, he can’t remember being there in the first place. Some small part of him recalls feeling paralyzed and suppressed, but he’s not sure what it is. The experience leaves him with a vague sense of foreboding.

Daniel Kaluuya summarized it this way: “This film is how racism feels. You get paranoid and you can’t talk about it. You can’t voice it. In the end, [the feeling] comes out in a rage[21].”

Peele, for his part, said part of the metaphor of the sunken place is the gaslighting that occurred during the Obama administration: “Part of being a minority in this country is feeling like we’re perceiving things that we’re told we’re not perceiving.”

The message of the Obama years, from a standpoint of what some have called liberal arrogance, is that because America had a black president, it didn’t have to worry about racism anymore: There was a minority in the White House, so racism was solved! Get Out argued the opposite. Through the sunken place, the movie illustrated how a post-race America was still suppressing the advancement and representation of black people. Because as soon as racism is solved, there’s no need for reparations. If racism is solved, it becomes easier to wave away police violence, mass incarceration, drug penalties, and microaggressions. If racism is solved, we’ve achieved equality, when in fact we’re not even close.

With this in mind, it’s apparent how Get Out takes down the myth of post-racial America not just through the microaggressions (and eventual macroaggressions) of the white characters, but through Chris’ stature as a black horror protagonist. As Childish Gambino signals at the top of the movie, there are few smarter horror-flick characters than Chris in recent memory. He’s instinctive, strong, cautious, and in Peele’s terms, woke. He has a spidey sense for danger and he acts on it. He’s the center of Eddie Murphy’s “get out the house” joke.

Again, Peele is instructive on how Chris’ capability interacts with the movie’s themes: “[In part], the sunken place is [also[ a metaphor for the marginalization of the black horror audience,” he says in his director’s commentary. “We’re relegated to the theater. We don’t have representation on screen, with our ability to sense trouble before it happens. This movie was an answer to our lack of representation.” By being on the same page as black audiences shouting at him to run, find a weapon, defend himself, etc., Chris not only affirms their ability to sense danger, but empowers them to speak up about it: “Get out the house!”

This was a significant concept. It has been written about often how the minority experience in the United States conditions African Americans to be wary and vigilant toward threats, explicit or otherwise, in their environment. That translates to Chris in Get Out, whether he’s listening to Dean’s pandering slang upon their first meeting or navigating a hostile daytime luncheon. In fact, Chris is so woke to the danger around him in the movie that you as the viewer never disagree with his actions. You never have the “bro, just leave” moment or the “ugh, why are you going upstairs?!” complaint. This is an essential bond, and it’s paid off by the movie’s precise, well-conceived ending.

Get Out’s final confrontation is between Chris and Rose. At this point, the whole conspiracy has been revealed: Rose and the Armitages are part of a secret organization called the Red Alchemist Society[22], which seeks immortality by kidnapping black people, removing their brains, and replacing their brains with those of aging members within the organization. The black people are sent to the sunken place while the white person commodifies their body. The metaphor, at this point, goes without saying.

The biggest reveal in Get Out, however, isn’t all the body-snatching stuff, but rather, the reveal that Chris’ girlfriend Rose has been in on her family’s scheme the entire time[23]. It’s a devastating and provocative revelation given Chris’ fear of abandonment, and it makes her position as his final obstacle in the movie a fitting one.

In the movie’s climax, Rose is lying in the street, incapacitated[24], while Chris kneels over her body. He starts to choke her and kill her, but after recognizing the monstrousness of his actions, he stops himself. It’s at this exact moment we see the lights of a police cruiser encroach upon the scene.

It’s a stomach-dropping moment. As Peele has pointed out, the arrival of the police in most horror movies is a good thing, but in Get Out, it’s the opposite, especially given this particular tableau: a black man pinning a bloody white woman to the ground. The cruiser stops. Rose begins crying for help. Chris rises to his feet and places his hands behind his head, His face contains multitudes: exhaustion, disbelief, sorrow, determination. The door to the cruiser opens.

And out steps Chris’ best friend Rod, a TSA agent who’s been on the case for the entire final act. During Get Out’s theatrical run, Rod’s appearance became an applause moment. People went absolutely nuts. Not only was Rod terrific comic relief throughout the movie and an instant fan favorite (Lil Rel Howery broke out in the role), in this scenario he embodied the opposite of what a police officer would be. Rod’s a rescuer, an ally, and a hero.

The response to Rod is the signpost indicating how well Get Out works. By this scene—and probably for some time beforehand—you’re seeing everything in the movie through Chris’ eyes, even if you don’t share Chris’ background or race or gender. When the cruiser pulls up at the end, your first thought is dread. The cops are the worst-case scenario for Chris. That means they’re the worst-case scenario for you, too. So when Rod appears, it’s a relief. Maybe you’ve never felt that way before, but that means the movie has something to offer no matter your perspective. It means Get Out was effective in communicating its message, and that rush of empathy and understanding makes it one of the best horror endings in years[25].

And it’s likely the triumph of the ending drove more people to see the movie. Get Out’s box office performance was one of the biggest surprises of 2017. Projected to make about $20 million its opening weekend, the movie actually pulled $33 million, and while a typical 2.5 multiplier (translation: most movies end up making two and a half times their opening-weekend earnings) positioned it to total about $75 million, Get Out made an astonishing $180 million in the United States before it left theaters.

Acclaim would follow. Peele would secure the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, but the movie would also see nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor in a Leading Role for Kaluuya.

From this point, Peele’s career would enter a mogul-esque phase. After the success of Get Out, his production company Monkeypaw would grow to finance and create more socially-conscious stories. Since 2017, they’ve produced movies like Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman and Peele’s anticipated Get Out follow-up Us, as well as television series like CBS’ Twilight Zone reboot (with Peele as the Rod Sterling-style narrator) and Amazon’s Nazi-hunter show The Hunt. 

Peele’s sophomore effort, Us, was an expansion of his style in the vein of Tarantino’s leap from Reservoir Dogs to Pulp Fiction or Shyamalan’s leap from Sixth Sense to Unbreakable. Us is longer, broader, flashier, and more inscrutable than Get Out, but it retains Peele’s sharp eye for the American condition and even hand with balancing horror, comedy, and commentary. It’s fantastic, but more difficult to parse, and that makes it feel just a tiny bit like an exercise, a movie by a thinker more than a feeler.

Get Out, meanwhile, is a heart-and-soul effort. It feels like the thing Peele always wanted to make, and its glorious highs feel rooted in that feverous passion, from its homage to The Shining in the opening credits to its Halloween-esque first scene to its layered, appalling, B-movie body-snatching storyline.

You feel this most in Get Out when Chris learns about the plot to remove his brain. On the director’s commentary, Peele’s enthusiasm ticks up a notch. He reels off the scene’s influences (The Matrix, Lost) before diving deep into its thematic implications.

“You [as a black person] are being valued for your skin and your culture and for what enhances the lives [of white people],” Peele says, speaking for the body snatchers. “You’re not being valued for your soul as a human being.” He pauses. On the screen, we see a montage of all the sneaky-evil white people Chris met in the movie. We see them feel his arms and contrive hip phrasings and opposite them we see the movie’s black characters in subtle states of confinement. Peele continues. “…Yeah, I don’t think I’ll ever write anything as cool as that for the rest of my life.”

Minutes later, Chris resists the body snatchers’ hypnosis by stuffing cotton into his ears—freedom via embracing the legacy of his blackness—and using a symbol of his fear, a deer head, to impale one of his attackers. As Chris escapes the house, he takes down the Armitages one by one, sometimes turning their methods against them. It’s a cathartic sequence no matter who you are. In these moments, you’re with Chris. You understand him. You understand why this matters to him. You share in his victory. How many other American movies, let alone American horror movies, have offered such an empathic, transportive experience? After 2016, how many had the boldness and audacity to try?

As he watches Chris get out the house, Peele chuckles: “I’m realizing it’s going to be tough to beat this one.” He was right.

[1] Before The Conjuring, Wan made two movies in the Insidious franchise, but his breakout was 2004’s Saw, a film that launched the torture-porn horror subgenre, and for that is probably unfairly maligned as an exploitative, culture-damaging gimmick. Watching Saw back, it’s way better than its legacy suggests. For one, it’s not as gory as you remember (the bloodiest scene involves a guy cutting off his own foot, which sounds bad in isolation, but compared to later films in the series, in which people peeled off their own skin and had their ribcages ripped from their chests, that was mild). For two, it builds most of its scares the old-fashioned way. YouTube the photography kidnapping scene. It’s supreme.

[2] It is the closest thing we have to a modern horror blockbuster—it cleared $700 million worldwide—but The Conjuring boasts a cinematic universe of sorts. It not only received a direct sequel, it birthed the spinoff franchise Annabelle—now three movies strong—and two standalone spinoffs, The Nun and Curse of La Llorona.

[3] Wingard would follow You’re Next with the John Carpenter-inspired The Guest before stumbling over the Blair Witch revival and falling face-first into the upcoming Godzilla vs. Kong movie due out in 2020. It’s anyone’s guess how that thing will turn out.

[4] Kent’s follow-up to Babadook was 2019’s The Nightingale, an Australian picture that’s sort of a Western-style revenge thriller, except supremely graphic and visceral and violent. Centering on a brutal sexual assault, it was considered one of the most difficult movies to come along in some time.

[5] On the shortlist for best final scene of the decade.

[6] Scarlett Johansson’s best performance. No kidding.

[7] Tough look for goats in this movie.

[8] Tough look for funerals in this movie.

[9] Tough look for severed heads in this movie.

[10] There’s one scene in this movie involving a pubic hair meat pie and it’s not even, like, in the top ten of the most fucked-up things you see.

[11] Meaning they used statistics and data to drive their strategy and become successful. Sorry, it’s a sports reference, and this whole thing keeps me from talking about sports, so there you go. Moneyball’s a good movie, by the way.

[12] You’re right; it’s not a horror movie, but it’s a fun “huh, didn’t know that!” movie to see amid the rest of this lineup.

[13] Blumhouse broke their $5 million cap rule a few times, mostly on sequels. The Purge: Anarchy cost $9 million and made $112 million, Insidious: Chapter 3 cost $10 million and made $113 million, Sinister 2 cost $10 million and made $53 million, Paranormal Activity 5 (!) cost $10 million and made $79 million, The Purge: Election Year cost $10 million and made $119 million, Ouija 2 cost $9 million and made $82 million, and Split (which was a secret sequel) cost $9 million but made $279 million. Whew.

[14] Not coincidentally, Get Out director Jordan Peele has cited both Living Dead and Rosemary’s Baby as major influences on his movie.

[15] Key and Peele has had a strong afterlife on YouTube. If you missed the show, some of its most popular sketches include “Substitute Teacher,” “Black Ice,” “I Said Bitch,” “Obama’s Anger Translator,” and “Obama Meet and Greet.” Sports Twitter also had a lot of fun with “East/West College Bowl,” though that sketch is maybe less representative of the show’s overall sensibility.

[16] This special comes under fire a lot because of some gay jokes Murphy makes in the early part of his set, but that aside, Delirious is probably the best thing you can watch to see what peak fame looks like. Murphy could have gone out there and just stood in silence for an hour and people would have cried laughing. His presence alone has people borderline falling out of their seats. It’s really remarkable (and, if we’re being honest, super funny).

[17] It’s impossible to discuss this movie in the kind of detail we want without spoiling it, so if you haven’t seen it, go watch it and come back. We’re about to ruin the whole thing.

[18] Chris is played by British actor Daniel Kaluuya, best known to this point for appearing in British shows Skins and Black Mirror. Kaluuya is awesome in Get Out. Horror-movie actors are shut out of the Oscars a lot, but Kaluuya broke through and earned a nomination for this movie. A few of his takes—the sunken place scene in particular—have entered the pantheon of modern acting moments. Chris is effortlessly cool in Get Out—Peele gushes about him on the DVD/Blu-Ray commentary—but apparently Chris’ charisma extends to the actor playing him. Peele says when people hear Kaluuya’s real-life British accent for the first time, “the dude just cleans up.”

[19] The Armitages are a murderer’s row of liberal icons. Rose is played by Allison Williams of Girls fame; her father is West Wing alum Bradley Whitford; her mother is Catherine Keener (Harper Lee in Capote); and her brother Jeremy is played by Caleb Landry Jones, who isn’t really known for anything but is creepy as hell.

[20] A fun tidbit from Peele’s commentary on the movie: Everyone’s experience in the sunken place is unique. Chris’ sunken place puts him alone in the dark with nothing but a small screen, reminiscent of his regret over neglecting his mother. Andre—Lakeith Stanfield’s character kidnapped at the beginning of the movie—would see something different, and so would anyone else.

[21] This quote recalls the external shot of Chris in the sunken place, eyes wide, tears running down his cheeks. It’s an indelible image and a truly insane acting moment from Kaluuya.

[22] The Red Alchemist Society is never mentioned outright in the movie, but Peele’s on the record with this detail. He explains in his director’s commentary the organization is informed by the Knights’ Templar, and if you have an eye for detail, Get Out is loaded with nods to the Society’s history, lineage, symbology, and methods.

[23] Here, we must devote space to Allison Williams’ criminally underappreciated performance in Get Out. She’s debatably Oscar-worthy, pulling off an incredible balancing act for the opening hour between Good Rose and Bad Rose (the true, evil Rose we know at the end of the movie was known behind the scenes as “Ro-Ro”), and executing some bonkers acting scenes as All-Out Bad Rose in the final act. The scene in which she sits on the bed and eats dry cereal beside a separate glass of cold milk is iconic (and Peele’s favorite), and the scene when she speaks with Chris’ friend Rod on the phone in her Good-Rose voice, all while maintaining the stone-cold killer visage of Bad Rose, is stunning. For this performance alone, you should watch Get Out twice. Ugh, and the “gimme those keys” scene! You could gush about this one for a long time.

[24] She’s been shot by Walter the groundskeeper. Minutes before, the audience learns Walter is actually the patriarch of the Armitage family in the body of a former victim, but Chris frees the victim from the sunken place with the flash of his phone camera, which is when he turns and shoots Rose. Besides being a grisly but cathartic moment for a supporting character, the sequence is another good example of Chris using brains instead of brawn to navigate a tough situation.

[25] However, this wasn’t the ending Peele and Co. had planned at first. Peele’s script originally had real cops show up and arrest Chris, but during test screenings, it was a total energy suck. Get Out producer Sean McKittrick says everyone would be feeling the movie for 100 minutes, but then the final 90 seconds “was like we punched everyone in the gut.” That’s when the crew decided to do reshoots. Marcus Henderson, the actor who played Walter the groundskeeper, articulated the thematic differences between the two endings well: “The original ending said, ‘No, you can’t catch a break,’ because that’s our reality [as black Americans]. The new ending gave us a break. We talk about the importance of watching that black body get away to tell his story, because you know who didn’t get to tell their own story? Trayvon Martin. Mike Brown. Philando Castille.”