Get Out: the film that dares to reveal the horror of liberal racism in America

The success of Jordan Peele’s Get Out – it took $30m in its first weekend in the US – is remarkable for lots of reasons. This is a first-time film from a respected, but essentially cult comedian, with no real big-name stars and a premise that is anathema to most of middle America. Yet people came out to see it in their thousands and critics raved about a horror film, which just does not happen. The film has a A- rating from audiences on CinemaScore, which as some have pointed out is unheard of for a horror, and a rare 99% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Like Donald Glover’s Atlanta, almost universal praise has followed the film’s debut and as with that series, Peele has dealt with race in America in a refreshing, funny and unflinching manner. The number of things Peele manages to reference is stunning: the taboo of mixed relationships, eugenics, the slave trade, black men dying first in horror films, suburban racism, police brutality.

Film-makers have used absurd horror to tackle race before, like in Timo Vuorensola’s 2012 film Iron Sky, which placed the action on the dark side of the moon where the Nazis had been hiding out, plotting to forcibly make black people white. But in Get Out, Peele brought the action much closer to home. Some have dubbed the film an “African-American nightmare movie”; it isn’t. This is an American horror story. (It comes after an impressive run of low-budget two-word-title horrors that place the action in middle America, and prod at issues bubbling just beneath the surface: Don’t Breathe, It Follows and You’re Next.)

The villains here aren’t southern rednecks or neo-Nazi skinheads, or the so-called “alt-right”. They’re middle-class white liberals. The kind of people who read this website. The kind of people who shop at Trader Joe’s, donate to the ACLU and would have voted for Obama a third time if they could. Good people. Nice people. Your parents, probably. The thing Get Out does so well – and the thing that will rankle with some viewers – is to show how, however unintentionally, these same people can make life so hard and uncomfortable for black people. It exposes a liberal ignorance and hubris that has been allowed to fester. It’s an attitude, an arrogance which in the film leads to a horrific final solution, but in reality leads to a complacency that is just as dangerous.

There was always something that didn’t quite ring true about Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner – a film many have compared to Get Out. It wasn’t in Sidney Poitier’s performance, which felt real: his anger, fear and frustration at having to battle his own family’s disapproval of him marrying a white woman and her family’s liberal hand-wringing was note-perfect. What didn’t feel real was the mostly calm reactions of almost everyone involved. In Get Out, under that placid exterior lurks the dark subconscious, where the true horror lies.

In the screening I was at, the biggest reactions from the mainly black audience were the knowing laughs whenever Peele took on tropes people recognised from real life. There was the anxiety about meeting the family of a white partner, which proved to be well placed when Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) arrives at the Armitage residency and is immediately treated to a line of ham-fisted and loaded questioning. There was the cringe-inducing way the black serving staff are treated; the interactions with the police who, unlike in most horror films, aren’t last-minute saviors but potential fatal hurdles.

Horror tropes are inverted, subverted and turned on their head, none more so than the way Peele takes the idea of a white woman being in peril as soon as she’s in an inner-city area and turns that into a black man being at his vulnerable in an affluent white neighborhood. The unique history – plus the fascination, fetishization and fear of dark-skinned men – on this continent gives Get Out even more punch. After seeing it, I started to think that it might not be a coincidence the film came out almost five years to the day since Trayvon Martin was killed.

Peele said The Stepford Wives, because of the way it “dealt with social issues in regards to gender”, was an inspiration for Get Out. “I just thought, that’s proof that you can pull off a movie about race, that’s a thriller and entertaining and fun,” he said. His debut has managed to do just that, and like The Daily Show – a satirical news show which became must-watch social commentary – Peele has placed real issues in an unlikely context, this time a horror film, and said something painfully true about them. Get Out will be one of this year’s biggest conversation starters. Just don’t expect it to be comfortable.