Get Out (USA: Jordan Peele, 2017)

 

 Get Out (USA: Jordan Peele, 2017: 103 mins)

Writer-director Jordan Peele announced himself as a gifted horror filmmaker straight out of the gate with his first feature, a hilarious satire of white liberalism in contemporary America that sits comfortably as a modern genre classic. The simple set up of young Black man Chris Washington (played memorably by Daniel Kaluuya) visiting his white girlfriend’s family is exquisitely handled to reveal deep-rooted racism. With Twilight Zone vibes, Peele crafts an ambience of paranoia and discomfort as Chris sinks deeper into a place where he feels like he is losing his mind, when in fact it is everyone around him who wants to steal it. A cutting social commentary on appropriation and ownership. – Katherine McLaughlin

Appen, Joe Von and Erik McClanahan. "Get Out / I Don't Feel at Home In This World." Adjust Your Tracking #141 (March 9, 2017)

Archer, Ina Diane. "Get Out." Film Comment (March 3, 2017)

Arıkan, Yağız. "Get Out." Film Critique (2018) ["When we see a horror film, we usually have a faint idea on the style or the content. We expect to be scared or surprised by a creepy clown, a monster or a killer. In the horror film "Get Out" by Jordan Peele, we do get surprised, not by one of the mentioned above but with an unexpected message on racism, and on our society. In this video, I explain how this message is portrayed, and if he really stays true to the roots of the horror genre."]

Bakare, Lanra. "Get Out: The Film That Dares to Reveal Liberal Racism in America." The Guardian (February 28, 2017)

Benton, Michael. "Jordan Peele (Ongoing Filmmaker Archive)." Dialogic Cinephilia (September 12, 2023)

Booker, M. Keith. "GET OUT (2017): DIRECTOR JORDAN PEELE." Comments on Culture (ND)

Breznican, Anthony. "Black Storytellers Are Using Horror to Battle Hate." Vanity Fair (August 3, 2020) ["After Get Out, movies such as Antebellum, the upcoming Candyman retelling, and other tales of terror and the macabre are part of a cultural exorcism centuries in the making."]

Butler, Bethonie. "The Brilliant Casting of Jordan Peele's Get Out." The Washington Post (March 9, 2017)

Chack, Erin. "22 Secrets Hidden in Get Out That You May Have Missed." Buzz Feed (March 3, 2017)

Colburn, Randall. "Horror and Race: How Jordan Peele’s Get Out Flips the Script." CoS (February 26, 2017)

Daniel, James Rushing. "'Another One for the Fire': George A. Romero on Race." The Los Angeles Review of Books (July 25, 2017)

Dowd, A.A. "Jordan Peele shifts from comedy to horror with the smart, cutting Get Out." A.V. Club (February 23, 2017)

Hancock, James, Mikhail Karadimov and Marcus Pinn. "Jordan Peele's Get Out & The Social Thriller." Wrong Reel #238 (February 28, 2017)

Harris, Brandon. "The Giant Leap Forward of Jordan Peele's Get Out." The New Yorker (March 4, 2017)

Harris, Cydnii Wilde. "Get Out as the Horror Black Films Face in the Foreign Market." (Posted on Youtube: March 14, 2018)

Hoberman, J."A Real American Horror Story." The New York Review of Books (March 13, 2017)

Hughes, Brooke Dianne-Mae. "Our Sunken Place: 'Post-Racial' America in Jordan Peele's Get Out." M.A. Thesis for the Department of English at State University of New York at Buffalo, NY: June 2018.

Izaakson, Jennifer. "Get Out: A bone-chilling, discomfort-inducing, laughter-provoking artistic and political triumph." Ceasefire (April 7, 2017)

Jones, Matthew. "Politicizing the Horrific: How American Anxieties Play Out on Screen." Philosophy in Film (March 25, 2017)

Keetley, Dawn. "Get Out: Political Horror." Jordan Peele's Get Out: Political Horror. The Ohio State University Press, 2020: 1-22. 

Lawrence, Novotny. "White mansions, black bodies: Get Out and the New Age slave plantation." Jump Cut #62 (Winter 2023/2024) ["This article is divided into three sections, the first of which discusses Hollywood films’ presentations of slave plantations as inspired by the Lost Cause Tradition, demonstrating the ways in which mainstream cinema has depicted, distorted, and policed the “right ways” to exist as Black. The second section focuses on independent cinema’s presentation of what I refer to as the Panoptic plantation, a horrific construct that reveals the depths of slave states’ surveillance and control of Black bodies. The article concludes by detailing how Get Out is endemic of what I assert is an original and frightening construct of slavery and plantations that functions as a harrowing metaphor for contemporary racism and the ways in which it polices and haunts Black bodies."]

Lyonhart, Jonathan D. "Peele’s Black, Extraterrestrial, Critique of Religion." Journal of Religion & Film (October 2023) ["While Jordan Peele’s films have always held their mysteries close to the chest, they eventually granted their viewers some climactic clarity. Get Out (2017) used an 1980s style orientation video to clear up its neuroscientific twist, while Us (2019) had Lupita Nyongo’s underworld twin narratively spell out the details of the plot. Yet Nope (2022) refuses to show its hand even after the game is over, never illuminating the connection between its opening scene and the broader film, nor a myriad of other questions. As such, critics complained that it stitched together two seemingly incongruent plots without explanation; one where a chimp attacks the crew of a successful Hollywood show, the other where an alien organism haunts a small ranch in the middle of nowhere. In this paper, I will argue that a theological interpretation of Nope helps explain some of these mysteries at its center, while revealing Peele’s underlying religious critique and its place within his broader oeuvre."]

Mooney, Shannon. "Sticking to the Script: Constructions of Sonic Whiteness in Get Out and Sorry to Bother You." Supernatural Studies 7.2 (131-154) ["This article places Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) into conversation with Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) in order to explore how both films represent whiteness as a penetrative sonic force that can be both heard and recognized. I explore how these two films challenge the popular notion that whiteness, unlike Blackness, is an empty and neutral signifier; instead, these films present whiteness as a racial category that possesses distinct sonic registers. Through their engagements with neoslavery, minstrelsy, and racial passing, these films parody the ways that Blackness has become socially and culturally constructed as “sounding” a certain way, and instead depict whiteness as something that can be aurally recognized and imitated. Through probing at their constructions of sonic whiteness, both Get Out and Sorry to Bother You problematize how popular audiences have been trained to hear (as well as see) race and respond to a longer history of the racialization of sound."]

Morris, Wesley and Jenna Wortham. "Get Out, S-Town, and What To Do With Our Racial Past." Still Processing (April 13, 2017)

Nolan, Amy. "The Sunken Place and the 'Electronic Elsewhere' of Jordan Peele’s Get Out." Supernatural Studies 7.2 (2022) ["One of the most compelling uses of analog technology in
contemporary horror thus far is Jordan Peele’s use of the television as reflection of and portal to the Sunken Place in Get Out (2017). From the time that the television was invented, the combination of sound and image has magnified the ghostly possibilities of reproduction. According to Jeffrey Sconce, “the paradox of visible, seemingly material worlds trapped in a box in the living room and yet conjured out of nothing more than electricity and air, [wherein] the ‘electronic elsewhere’ generated by television was thus more palpable and yet every bit as phantasmic the occult empires of previous media’” (126). Peele shows us the “electronic elsewhere” by connecting the Sunken Place to the analog television set as a signifier of protagonist Chris Washington’s repressed memory of his mother’s death. The television becomes an extension of the national nightmare and personal trauma that overshadow Chris’s adult life. Get Out is a distinctive, twenty-first century story, yet it draws from earlier horror films that focus on humanity’s relationship with technology."]

Novak, A.M. "Not Your Trophy: Deer Imagery in Jordan Peele's Get Out." Vague Visages (March 22, 2017)

Oliver, Toby. "Interview with Get Out Cinematographer." Following Films (March 7, 2017)

Palis, Elena M. "The Brand of Peele."  Film Quarterly (December 12, 2023) ["Jordan Peele’s third feature film, Nope (2022), reenergized the already substantive circulation of “Peele” as auteur-star signifier. In their generic, political, and aesthetic coherence, Peele’s directorial features satisfy the classical auteur theorization of a knowable author and “authority.” Yet central to Peele’s signature films are resolute unpredictability, character shape-shifting, and narrative misdirection, epitomized by body snatchers in Get Out (2017), tethered doppelgängers in Us (2019), and aliens camouflaged by clouds in Nope. As an ironic manipulation of auteur knowability, Peele’s motif of deceptive, equivocal ontology requires a more complex understanding of Peele’s authorship, one that also takes into account Peele’s extrafilmic roles as producer, showrunner, and star persona."]

Parham, Jason. "Get Out Proves The Only Way To Battle White Supremacy Is To Kill It." Fader (March 8, 2017)

Peele, Jordan. "Jordan Peele Gets Into Horror." Still Following (March 2, 2017) ["It’s not hard to explain the premise of “Get Out.” A woman (Allison Williams) takes her boyfriend (Daniel Kaluuya) home to meet her parents (Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford). He’s black, she and her parents are white — like, liberal white, good white. They’re totally down. What’s complicated to talk about with this film — the No. 1 movie in the country, by the way — is where the racial horror and the comedy take us and where they come from. It’s funny, scary, shocking and sad."]

Phillips, Maya. "Sorry to Bother You and the New Black Surrealism." Slate (July 18, 2018) ["Like Get Out and Atlanta, Boots Riley’s gonzo satire realizes the best way to depict black people’s reality is to depart from it."]

Pott, Julia. "My Mom's Amazing Voicemail Review of Get Out." Talkhouse (May 10, 2017)

Ratcliff, Travis Lee. "The Legacy of Paranoid Thrillers." (Posted on Vimeo: June 2017) ["Paranoid thrillers are constant in cinema's history, but at any given moment they reflect our specific anxieties back to us and reveal how we feel about our institutions. Here, I explore how paranoid thrillers crystalized as a genre in American cinema and examine the possibility of a contemporary renaissance in conspiracy fiction."]

Subissati, Andrea and Alexandra West. "Where is My Mind: The Stepford Wives (1975) and Get Out (2017)." The Faculty of Horror #67 (November 27, 2018) ["This month, Andrea and Alex tackle two films whose hearts lie in the darkest, most secret parts of suburban utopia. In Bryan Forbes’ The Stepford Wives and Jordan Peele’s Get Out, we follow protagonists who are socialized to make room for the privileged and examine what happens when they strike back."]

Thrasher, Steven. "Why Get Out Is the Best Movie Ever Made About American Slavery: Jordan Peele's horror film is about the theft of black bodies—but it isn't set in the Antebellum South." Esquire (March 1, 2017)

Wilkinson, Alissa. "Get Out is a horror film about benevolent racism. It's spine-chilling." Vox (February 25, 2017)

Wittmer, Carrie. "Why this new horror movie has a rare perfect score from critics — and you need to see it." Business Insider (February 23, 2017)

Wynter, Kevin. Critical Race Theory and Jordan Peele's Get Out. Bloomsbury, 2022. ["This book provides a concise introduction to critical race theory and shows how this theory can be used to interpret Jordan Peele's Get Out. It surveys recent developments in critical race studies and introduces key concepts that have helped shape the field such as Black masculinity, white privilege, the Black body, and miscegenation. The book's analysis of Get Out situates it within the context of the American horror film, illustrating how contemporary debates in critical race theory and approaches to the analysis of mainstream Hollywood cinema can illuminate each other. In this way, the book provides both an accessible reference guide to key terminology in critical race studies and film studies, while contributing new scholarship to both fields."]