***SPOILER ALERT***

After seeing Jordan Peele’s chef-d’oeuvre, Get Out, I couldn’t help but pull every piece of myself from the floor as I thought, here is an artist best known for his comedic sketch work who has placed a lens on the debilitating effects of black fear and has dialogued with us through the means of a psychological horror. The result is nothing short of a masterpiece. Peele, himself a partner to interracial love, digs into the malaise of blackness in western society. Get Out centers on an interracial couple: Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a black photographer who is well aware of the ramifications of his love and Rose (Allison Williams), a lily white believer in care-free devotion who has admittedly failed to inform her parents that she is romantically involved with a black man. The couple travels to the suburbs to meet Lily’s family, who is a supposedly liberal group of people living in what can only be seen as a quaint, predominantly Republican community. The dichotomy between thought and practice already frightens me — the love and appropriation of black culture and the brutality against Black bodies. As a cinephile, one of the most interesting accomplishments of Get Out is the complete alteration of black identity in regard to Hollywood horror.

My first time being immersed in a majority caucasian setting occurred at a UCLA film camp when I was 18. We discussed our favorite genres and I mentioned horror. I was told, as a callous joke, that I couldn’t live long if we made a horror film. I didn’t disagree. Though I should have been offended, I too was conditioned to believe that a black person had no business surviving the climax of a horror flick. In most instances, the black character existed to fulfill America’s false cry for diversity. What was Julius doing on that cruiser in Jason Takes Manhattan? Why was Ben in this all-white town in Night of the Living Dead? Why is Ice Cube on that boat in Anaconda when he didn’t enjoy sailing? Each character meeting very different fates at different points on the timeline, and for distinct reasons. Julius, whose head is brutally separated from its body, was a pawn. A stereotypical tough kid who appears to be from the inner-city, driven by brute aggression, less intuition. Ben, the mighty image of the black man, an early black hero in American cinema, seen in the final moments of Night as a zombie, does not get the satisfaction of riding off into the sunset. Danny, a character who suffers Ice Cube’s fame, survives the film in somewhat heroic fashion because Ice Cube the celebrity is too large to die. I, unfortunately, was not Ice Cube.

What Jordan Peele accomplishes with Get Out is the revolutionary act of making blackness covetable rather than confrontational. This film is a resounding response to black and white race relations in the United States. Truthfully, and honestly speaking, to be anything other than white is a frightening thing, making awareness a constant necessity. Since there is not only hatred and disdain for black bodies, but also admiration and covetousness, black America can rarely feel settled, confused as to what is valid and who to believe. Get Out, without restraint, indicts white America for its deadly predatory and parasitic habits. In essence, Get Out is an imagining of slavery set in contemporary times, but with the use of surrealism. This comes out of a desire to exploit blackness rather than contend it. In films of past, consider Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Night of the Living Dead, the skin color of our black leads was a point of contention. In the former of the two films, Sidney Poitier’s arrival to meet his white in-laws became the terror for them rather than Poitier. His docile presence awakened them to their primitive hatred, and the realization blurred color lines. In Night of the Living Dead, Ben has the wherewithal to lead a desperate band of survivors through a horrific zombie apocalypse. Due to his physical prowess, intelligence and charisma, he becomes a threat to Harry, an obnoxious white man suffering from a significant dose of racism. Yet and still, for both films, a white woman lies at the heart of the story.

Get Out takes the power from the white woman and makes blackness the focus, albeit the black man. This is the first I’d seen in any horror film that wasn’t blaxploitation. In Get Out, the white parasites, inspired by their own illusions of grandeur concerning black people, are in the business of stealing black consciousness and replacing it with their own. It’s puppetry at its finest. What’s even more perverse, once the black minds are replaced by white minds, ultimately co-opting blackness, the victims are still used for manual labor, or worse. It perpetuates the fear of many black Americans, which is the return of chattel slavery. The oppressive forces being the white woman, the overseer and the whip.

Rose’s character is one of the best examples of my analysis. This is a white woman who fakes innocence of the grand scheme in order to lure black men and women to their doom. She conspires against blackness because she is meaningless without a pedestal. This game is more about the preservation of her ego, for without, Rose is just like everyone else — regular. To be regular, to be humdrum, to be normal is tantamount to being without worth. Her sexual enchantment over others gives her purpose, which is how she qualifies black people. In order to maintain her position, she must render the black woman powerless by taking the black man or even taking the black woman herself. To state plainly, she forces herself and will on blackness in order to stake control because she desires power.

My next example involves Jim Hudson, a blind art curator played superbly by Stephen Root. Hudson is a faux liberal, debasing his white counterparts as dimwitted elitists like the indigent overseer who’s grown hip to class distinctions. He showers Chris with compliments and boasts of admiration, finding a way to break down any barriers. Hudson is soon revealed as a liberal snake, untrustworthy and envious of the qualities possessed by blackness. He claims to only want something that he could get from anywhere in the world, yet it’s Chris specifically who holds the particular trait he covets. This is the same thing as the false liberal claiming to see no color, which is more horrific than seeing color because to look over one’s blackness is to render the black identity invisible. Hudson pretends to be down for the cause when in actuality, he desires a piece of Chris. Hudson seeks to co-opt the black gaze and dim the lights on blackness as he himself is blind. To state plainly, rather than see for himself, Hudson desires to steal the insight that black identity has provided to people of melanin.

Finally, Jordan Peele has conceived a tale where the white establishment has enslaved black consciousness, the most horrifying detail of the film. Much of Get Out at face value may belie many attributes of the horror genre, but as a black person, the thought of having my blackness co-opted is probably some of the scariest and most psychologically traumatic shit I’ve ever considered, making this film frightening as fuck. When Chris gets hypnotized and lost in the void, I’m reminded of the countless Africans whose identities were forced from them, making them permeable and impressionable enough to assimilate into a white world. As in Bodysnatchers, black bodies in Get Out are stolen, made into pods and forced into a futuristic form of slavery. Something akin to the prison industrial system. Finally, a horror film that delves into and centralizes the fear that black people live with on a daily basis: the death of black consciousness and a brutal return to slavery.

To conclude, Get Out may be the film needed in order to lead a new vanguard of horrifying moviegoing experiences. Experiences that place blackness at the forefront of the antagonist’s desires. I envision a day where, if we survive the mass slayings, we will have not have done it to save whiteness, but we would have done it to save ourselves. Consider LL Cool J at the end of Halloween: H2O, returning at the end of the movie to prove that he’s made it after disappearing for nearly an hour. Consider Duane Martin in Scream 2, a squeamish cameraman who ridiculously, but sensibly, bows out of the narrative as a means to appease every single black moviegoer who exclaims, “Black folks ain’t nosey. Black folks would get the hell on out!” Though Get Out pulls the curtain on racial relations and the racial dynamics of interracial dating, there is much left about the Black experience that could be relayed as terrifying campfire stories. My college experience being one of them.

Donald Conley

Writing since January 2016 · 3 stories contributed