‘Get Out’ Stands as One of the Most Important Horror Movies Ever Made

Jordan Peele’s directorial debut is a timeless horror classic about racial bias

Credit: Universal Pictures

I haven’t been doing a great job lately at keeping up with the "Wednesday Rewinds” series I began a couple of months ago. This is mostly because I’m forgetful and not because I’ve given up on it. Anyway, with October here, being the slightly fanatical horror fan that I am, I’ll be reposting quite a lot of my Halloween movie reviews throughout the month. If entertainment isn’t for you, you’re always welcome to toggle on/off the material that interests you in the “sections” area. Hope everyone’s doing well, and thanks as always for reading!

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Nearly ten years after its release, Get Out remains every bit as hard-hitting. It drives home bitter truths that were just as difficult to digest and challenging to address in 2017 as they still are today in 2024.

In creating Get Out, writer and director Jordan Peele wanted to instill the message that, despite the progress we’ve made as a society, racism is still alive and well. But part of Get Out’s brilliance lies in the fact that its messaging is at once subtle and overt. As Vanity Fair stated in a review after the film’s release, “Get Out is about race — explicitly, implicitly, textually, subtextually.”

Race is a theme in the movie from the opening scene, but that doesn’t mean that Get Out moralizes. Instead, it frames the prejudice that hides within smiling faces as a slow-building horror. Rather than hit the viewer over the head with instances of obvious bigotry, there are no slurs, confederate flags, or skinheads present in the quietly hate-filled Armitage family that the film depicts.

Get Out creates horror from the way that racism creeps into people’s lives and communities. It shines a light on the menace that hides in those types of virtue-signaling progressives who turn around and call the police on peaceful birdwatchers.

The racial undertones are ubiquitous and all but impossible to ignore, yet subdued enough not to leave audiences feeling as though they’re being preached to. It’s never maudlin enough to lose magnetism or intrigue.

The home that serves as the movie’s main setting fosters an illusory sense of community for Chris, played by Daniel Kaluuya. Chris is an African American man and professional photographer on a reluctant trip to meet the family of his girlfriend, Rose, played by Allison Williams.

A year before the release of Ari Aster’s Hereditary, it’s a film that reinforces suspense through grating family tensions and a creeping crescendo of occult activity in much the same way. These past few years, it’s hard for me to imagine that there hasn’t been some creative interplay between the two up-and-coming visionary horror directors.

The house is isolated — and the road trip to get there pays loving homage to The Shining — but it’s not an isolation that the film decides to pay much focus to beyond that early sequence. The home is welcoming and doesn’t exactly come across as the baseboard of a murder mystery. It’s grand and traditional, but unmenacing. Similar to many haunted house horrors, the movie centers around a singular setting. But sparing a couple of jump scares, it relies on almost none of those same motifs.

At first, Rose’s parents and brother all seem normal enough. They host parties and have progressive-leaning politics, welcoming Chris into their house with hugs and open arms.

But during his time there, Chris confronts casually mounting racism that wears on both him and the audience. For white viewers, the scenes are guilt-inducing and uncomfortable, and for many black viewers, they present as something lamentably familiar.

Peele, having faced racial adversities of his own throughout his life, makes clear that these biases are insidious and hard to escape. The interactions throughout the film are characterized by such an uncanny realism that even the bit roles feel fully fleshed out in their subtle digs about race, fashion, and athleticism. Repeatedly capitalizing on this “well-meaning” sort of prejudice as a way of building tension and unease is an innovative device, and it never loses its novelty as the plot progresses.

Prior to the final act, there may still be a general willingness from viewers to forgive some of the family members’ shortcomings. There don’t seem to be any textbook evil villains nor ominous malevolent forces at play. The antagonists are nuanced, and as we’re introduced to them, most seem to actually boast likable characteristics.

Watching the comedy skit show Key and Peele, viewers can see the early makings of the Get Out director. Sketches like “White Zombies,” “Auction Block,” and “Substitute Teacher” showcased so much of the subversive ingenuity that would go on to define his directorial career. But even while his roots are apparent, the co-creator of the light-hearted comedy show is hardly the one people would have expected would go on to spearhead this bold new direction for the horror genre.

After Get Out, though, there were few who could deny the budding young director’s creative flair and talent for the world beyond comedy writing.

Caleb Landry Jones’ Jeremy has limited screen time but dominates with his mercurial, off-kilter presence in his few scenes. He’s vicious, impulsive, and unnerving.

Betty Gabriel, LaKeith Stanfield, and Marcus Henderson portray eerie side characters, and each fills the roles expertly. They’re strange and stilted and utterly discomfiting. One instance from Gabriel, in particular, displays such a terrified range of emotion that she steals the screen. She’s both robotic and ready to burst at the seams. It’s hard to look away as tears roll past her cloaking, contorted smile.

Lil Rel Howery is the epitome of comic relief, and it’s in his scenes especially that Peele’s prowess for comedy writing has an opportunity to shine. Howery’s improvisation also brings levity to the plot during its darkest moment. One exchange between him and a few skeptical police officers makes for one of the most hilarious scenes in a horror movie in memory. It’s riotous but believable and seamlessly well-integrated into the film.

Unlike the project that would follow it in 2019, Get Out unfolds more like a mystery in many respects than it does most horrors. There’s a growing sense of unease that viewers can’t help but feel as the movie continues, but on a first viewing, it’s hard to detect where exactly it’s pointed. The camerawork doesn’t hone in on the dark, shadowy, and foreboding, but creates something impressively warm and cordial. The discordance between color palettes and tones is masterful and instills a feeling of ease even as dark outcomes start to appear more and more inevitable.

Get Out is a movie with two separate endings, and while both have their merits, Peele initially wanted to take the bleaker road that never made its way to theaters. It’s that alternate ending that more effectively communicates the theme of the film. It ties its message together with a perfectly macabre bow. It’s brutal and borderline Shakespearian in its efficacy, and I would even argue the viewing experience incomplete without it.

Concerned that the darker ending might only further fuel divisions in the country, Peele opted instead for a safer and more formulaic approach to the conclusion. It’s a rare shortcoming in a nearly flawless film. But in a way, the decision to opt for that more sanitized ending we saw in theaters echoes the core theme of the movie and the position that he found himself in as a young, black director. He wrote the ending that we should have gotten, but was leery that it could be a career-curbing move for him to risk something so scathingly political making its way into that final cut.

The need to maintain that delicate balance explains why the movie struck the very soul of our nation and became a cultural phenomenon. Had it been a more established white director at the helm of the movie, they may not have feared all they would have had to lose in going the full distance and leaving viewers with something so unapologetically contentious to walk away from theaters digesting. Nor would a white director have been able to write this movie that so authentically captures the experience of racial victimization and culturally ingrained bias.

Tension builds throughout the movie and culminates in a deft series of twists likely to surprise almost any viewer on the first watch-through. And in The Sixth Sense fashion, they’re twists that alter subsequent viewings in significant ways.

In a genre that stretches back over a century, reinvention is rare. But Jordan Peele is one of the few directors who’s proven that it’s still possible to innovate and continually surprise viewers with something fresh, incisive, and unexpected. It was a film that redefined how racism could be used as a springboard for imagination within horror movies moving forward.