Table Of ContentJORDAN PEELE’S GET OUT
N E W S U N S :
RACE, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY IN THE SPECULATIVE
Susana M. Morris and Kinitra D. Brooks, Series Editors
JORDAN PEELE’S GET OUT
Political Horror
Edited by Dawn Keetley
THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
COLUMBUS
Copyright © 2020 by The Ohio State University.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Keetley, Dawn, 1965– editor.
Title: Jordan Peele’s Get out : political horror / edited by Dawn Keetley.
Other titles: Get out | New suns: race, gender, and sexuality in the speculative.
Description: Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, [2020] | Series: New
suns: race, gender, and sexuality in the speculative | Includes bibliographical
references and index. | Summary: “Essays explore Get Out’s cultural roots,
including Shakespeare’s Othello, the female gothic, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby,
The Stepford Wives, and the zombie, rural, suburban, and body-swap subgenres
of the modern horror film. Essays make connections with Nat Turner, W. E. B.
Du Bois, and James Baldwin”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019045485 | ISBN 9780814214275 (cloth) | ISBN 0814214274
(cloth) | ISBN 9780814277812 (ebook) | ISBN 0814277810 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Peele, Jordan, 1979– —Criticism and interpretation. | Get out
(Motion picture : 2017) | Horror films—History and criticism. | Racism in
motion pictures. | United States—Race relations—21st century.
Classification: LCC PN1997.2.G46 J67 2020 | DDC 791.43/72—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045485
Cover design by Black Kirby
Text design by Juliet Williams
Type set in Adobe Palatino
C O N T E N T S
Introduction Get Out: Political Horror
DAWN KEETLEY 1
PART 1: THE POLITICS OF HORROR
Chapter 1 From Tragedy to Horror: Othello and Get Out
JONATHAN BYRON AND TONY PERRELLO 23
Chapter 2 Burning Down the House: Get Out and the Female Gothic
LINNIE BLAKE 36
Chapter 3 A Peaceful Place Denied: Horror Film’s “Whitopias”
ROBIN R. MEANS COLEMAN AND NOVOTNY LAWRENCE 47
Chapter 4 Get Out and the Zombie Film
ERIN CASEY-WILLIAMS 63
Chapter 5 Place, Space, and the Reconfiguration of “White Trash”
Monstrosity
BERNICE M. MURPHY 72
Chapter 6 The Body Horror of White Second Chances in John
Frankenheimer’s Seconds and Jordan Peele’s Get Out
ROBYN CITIZEN 87
vi ≈ CONTENTS
Chapter 7 Jordan Peele and Ira Levin Go to the Movies: The
Black/Jewish Genealogy of Modern Horror’s Minority
Vocabulary
ADAM LOWENSTEIN 101
Chapter 8 Racism that Grins: African American Gothic Realism
and Systemic Critique
SARAH ILOTT 114
PART 2: THE HORROR OF POLITICS
Chapter 9 Reviewing Get Out’s Reviews: What Critics Said and
How Their Race Mattered
TODD K. PLATTS AND DAVID L. BRUNSMA 131
Chapter 10 Specters of Slave Revolt
SARAH JULIET LAURO 147
Chapter 11 Staying Woke in Sunken Places, or the Wages of
Double Consciousness
MIKAL J. GAINES 160
Chapter 12 Holding onto Hulk Hogan: Contending with the Rape
of the Black Male Psyche
ROBERT LARUE 174
Chapter 13 The Horror of the Photographic Eye
KYLE BRETT 187
Chapter 14 The Fantasy of White Immortality and Black Male
Corporeality in James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the
Man” and Get Out
LAURA THORP 200
Chapter 15 Scientific Racism and the Politics of Looking
CAYLA McNALLY 212
Chapter 16 “Do You Belong in This Neighborhood?” Get Out’s
Paratexts
ALEX SVENSSON 223
Cast List 237
List of Contributors 239
Index 245
I N T R O D U C T I O N
GET OUT
Political Horror
DAWN KEETLEY
RELEASED ON February 24, 2017, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, which he wrote
and directed, was by any standards a game-changing film. It has been
acclaimed by critics, accruing almost unanimously positive reviews—a vir-
tually unheard of feat for a horror film. (It has 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, with
345 positive and only six negative reviews.)1 Peele’s film was not only a suc-
cess with critics but also with audiences. Produced on a mere $4.5 million
budget, Get Out has grossed over $255 million worldwide. It was nominated
for four Academy Awards (again, unusual for a horror film)—Best Picture,
Best Director, Best Actor (Daniel Kaluuya), and Best Original Screenplay.
Peele won the award for best Original Screenplay, becoming the first African
American writer to win in this category.2
Get Out centers on an African American man, Chris Washington, who
takes a trip to upstate New York to visit the wealthy family of his white
girlfriend, Rose Armitage. The off-putting family visit immerses Chris in
a world of microaggressions that get progressively more unnerving, even
sinister, culminating in the terrifying moment when he realizes he has been
1. “Get Out,” Rotten Tomatoes, June 15, 2019, https://www.rottentomatoes.
com/m/get_out.
2. “Get Out,” Box Office Mojo, June 15, 2019, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/
movies/?id=blumhouse2.htm.
1
2 ≈ INTRODUCTION
seduced into a deadly trap. Knocked unconscious, Chris wakes up in the
family’s basement strapped to a chair and watching a video that tells him he
will be undergoing an operation, the Coagula procedure, that will transplant
a white man’s brain into his head, divesting him of almost all consciousness
and rendering him a mere passenger in his own body. Both a horror film
about race and a parable about contemporary racial relations told through
horror tropes, Get Out has been at the center of a storm of controversy over
genre. It was infamously nominated as Best Picture in the Musical or Com-
edy category at the Golden Globe Awards in 2017, a designation that sat
well with no one, including Peele himself, who publicly entered the fray by
tweeting somewhat tongue-in-cheek that Get Out was actually a documen-
tary.3 Get Out has also—and equally controversially—been dubbed an exem-
plar of “elevated horror,”4 a term at which horror fans tend to take umbrage
since it presumes that any horror film with artistic and cultural merit must
have a qualifier—that it can’t be simply horror.
Get Out in the Political Horror Tradition
While virtually every interview Peele has given positions Get Out as a “hor-
ror film,”5 he has self-consciously chosen to designate it a “social thriller”—a
film, as Peele describes it, in which the “monster” is society itself. As Peele
explains the genesis of this term, he was trying to figure out how to catego-
rize Get Out and felt that neither “horror” nor “psychological thriller” cap-
tured exactly what he was doing, so he thought, “social thriller,” because the
“bad guy is society.” Peele continued, “I coined the term social thriller, but
I definitely didn’t invent it.”6 Peele has elaborated to Business Insider about
the central tenet of the “social thriller,” which certainly defines the particular
brand of horror in Get Out: “The best and scariest monsters in the world are
3. Jordan Peele, @JordanPeele, Twitter, November 15, 2017, https://twitter.com/
jordanpeele/status/930796561302540288?lang=en.
4. John Krasinski dubbed Get Out an example of “elevated horror” as he was talking
about his own The Quiet Place (2018). See Olsen, “How John Krasinski.” See also Knight,
“There’s No Such Thing,” for a powerful refutation of the term “elevated horror.”
5. For instance, as he describes writing the screenplay for Get Out and then making
the decision to direct it himself, Peele says, “I have seen so few horror movies where a
black person has been given the director’s chair that I realized, Why not me? I know this
thing.” Yuan and Harris, “First Great Movie.”
6. Yuan and Harris, “First Great Movie.” On Peele’s comments on the “social
thriller,” see also Harris, “Giant Leap,” and Weinstein, “‘Society.’” There is now an entire
Wikipedia entry on the “Social Thriller.” See Wikipedia Contributors, “Social Thriller.”
DAWN KEETLEY ≈ 3
human beings and what we are capable of especially when we get together.
I’ve been working on these premises about these different social demons,
these innately human monsters that are woven into the fabric of how we
think and how we interact, and each one of my movies is going to be about a
different one of these social demons.”7 For Peele, then, the distinctive terrain
of the “social thriller” is that its monster is intractably human, the “demon”
inextricably part of the very real fabric of society. Debate over the exact rela-
tion between a “social thriller” and a horror film is likely to continue, as
Peele intends to direct four more social thrillers; indeed, his second feature,
Us, released in March 2019, has been dubbed both social thriller and also
“more unabashedly a horror film” than Get Out.8
Acknowledging that the social thriller has a long tradition, Peele curated
a series of films for the Brooklyn Academy of Music called “The Art of the
Social Thriller” to coincide with the opening of Get Out, and most, not sur-
prisingly, were recognizably horror films—Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Night of
the Living Dead (1968), The Shining (1980), Misery (1990), The People under
the Stairs (1991), Silence of the Lambs (1991), Candyman (1992), Scream (1996),
and Funny Games (1997)—along with a few nonhorror films that amplify the
“social” part of “social thriller”—Rear Window (1954), Guess Who’s Coming to
Dinner (1967), and The ‘Burbs (1989).9 Peele’s insistence that the monster of
the “social thriller” is unambiguously human does stand at odds, though,
with some of the prevailing definitions of horror. Noël Carroll, for instance,
has posited that “art-horror” is distinguished as a genre by its explicitly
nonhuman and “impure” monster—“categorically interstitial, categorically
contradictory, incomplete or formless” and “not classifiable according to our
standing categories.” Carroll has rather notoriously claimed that films with
human “monsters” (including Psycho) are not horror.10
As useful as Carroll’s definition is, however, it does not account for what
has been the longstanding tradition of the political horror film, which is
indeed driven by very human monsters. The unjustly neglected Thirteen
Women (George Archainbaud, 1932) might be said to originate this tradition
in the US: it’s a proto-slasher in which an Indian-white “half-breed” (Myrna
Loy) takes murderous revenge on the white sorority sisters who ostracized
her for her race.11 The tradition notably includes (along with those Peele
screened in his “social thriller” series) The Last House on the Left (1972), The
7. Guerrasio, “Jordan Peele.”
8. Collins, “Jordan Peele’s Us.”
9. “Jordan Peele.”
10. Carroll, Philosophy, 32–33, 38.
11. See Keetley and Hofmann, “Thirteen Women.”
