by A.J.
This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas.
Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month-long
celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. There are a lot of horror movies
out there, but as a genre, horror is still looked down upon by some mainstream
critics and moviegoers. It doesn’t help that, admittedly, there are so few
quality horror movies made but, like comedy, it’s a very difficult and
subjective genre. So, in the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some
recommendations for scary movies to help you celebrate Shocktober.
Night 3: Social Horror
“I told you not to go in that house.”
You might be surprised to learn that Jordan Peele, of the
comedy duo Key and Peele, is the writer/director behind the tense and thrilling
horror film Get Out. You might be even more surprised to learn that this
excellently crafted thriller is Peele’s directorial debut. Even so, the result
is a horror film that broke box office records, earned enthusiastic praise from
critics and audiences alike, and even sparked conversations about the
possibility of Peele earning Oscar nominations (fingers crossed). Get Out was
released in theaters earlier this year (it’s now available on home video) and
it will very likely make an appearance on my Best of 2017 list.
Get Out opens with a young black man lost in an affluent
suburban neighborhood at night. There shouldn’t be anything for anyone to be afraid of in such a neighborhood, but this is a film about danger hiding
behind a benign surface. A car slows down and the young man is abducted. The
movie then introduces another young man black man, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya),
preparing to go on a weekend trip with his girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams),
to meet her parents for the first time. Chris is nervous because Rose hasn’t
told her parents that he’s black. She tells him not to worry; her parents are
very liberal and progressive. Her parents, Dean (Bradley Whitford) and Missy
(Catherine Keener), are indeed progressive and are very welcoming and polite to
Chris…uncomfortably welcoming and polite. Dean tells Chris that he would’ve
voted for Obama for a third term and Missy offers to help Chris quit smoking
through hypnosis. Chris declines the offer but then wakes up one morning to
find that he suddenly no longer has any urge to smoke. Adding to the strange and
unnatural atmosphere are the family’s black servants: a groundskeeper, Walter,
and maid, Georgina. Both exhibit strange mannerisms as though they are in a
trance.
Though this is Peele’s first film he makes masterful use of
the language of cinema. A few film critics compared the style of Get Out to
John Carpenter’s Halloween and the comparison is not unwarranted. Peele
draws inspiration not only from John Carpenter, but also Hitchcock, and George Romero’s
Night of the Living Dead. Like those films and filmmakers, Peele makes the
audience squirm in their seats by building suspense. He uses closeups for
claustrophobic tension and lets the actors show us how scary a scene is through
their performance. He opts to unsettle the viewer through the strange
behavior of the characters instead of gory imagery. This approach also underlines the
idea that the disturbing horror of modern racism is that it has coated itself
in a veneer of deceptive and insincere nicety. Horror movies have always been
excellent mediums for indirectly addressing social issues (such as Night of the
Living Dead, which featured a black man as the hero and subtlety addresses the Civil Rights movement and counter-protests of the 1960's). In Get Out however, race
and racism are at the forefront. Chris has been singled out, “chosen,” because
he is black, though the sinister characters say in calm and almost convincing
tones that race has nothing to do with it. Perhaps they actually believe that,
despite the obvious truth.
Get Out is the kind of horror film that builds and builds
tension and then finally has a bloody climatic release. Up until this point in
the film, you might have forgotten that you were watching a horror movie.
Though the film does get bloody, it is not very gory or explicit. Like great
horror filmmakers before him, Peele suggests more than he shows and lets the
audience scare themselves. The blood and gruesome imagery of the climax is not
the source of the movie’s scares or horror. They are merely set dressing. The
horror comes from the situation Chris is in, the characters he is surrounded
by, and how believable it feels.
Get Out is not without humor—Peele is a comedian after
all—but, the humor does not feel out of place. Chris’s friend, Rod (LilRel Howery), is top
notch comic relief and catches on quick to the situation in which Chris is trapped.
Though Rod was able to figure out the secret evil plan, I was not exactly sure
how the scheme worked. Fortunately, the details don’t derail the story. The most important thing is what we understand
most clearly. Chris needs to get out of this place, as soon as can, as fast as
he can.
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