Get Out: Moral Monsters at the Intersection of Racism and the Horror Film

Abstract

Get Out (2017, United States, dir. Jordan Peele) is an allegory for the experience of being black in America, one that 'tells it like it is' in the parlance of the 1960s Black Power movement: the daily toll of microaggressions, the objectification of the black body for white ends, and the devaluation of human dignity, or what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls 'the plunder of black life' as the default setting for American national identity (2015, 111). The film's central image of this experience is the 'sunken place,' a form of social death (Patterson 1982) that the film represents as a void within which black subjectivity is constricted and isolated while a white person controls his/her fate. To depict this, the film uses strategies of terror to produce moments of subjective intensity, which align the viewer with the protagonist's perspective (Hanich 2010), and to construct the moral monsters that would systematically degrade a class of human beings without remorse (see Baldwin in

History, Horror, and Peak TV: Experimental History Series

“…The extent to which these texts offer thoughtful critiques of structural racism, whiteness and the Black experience varies greatly. While Peele’s G et Out “casts a critical eye at oppressive power structures from the perspective of colonized black people” (Pinedo 2020, 97) other race horror films and TV shows foreground Black suffering in a way that is superficial and exploitative (Okundaye 2021). Horror scholars have not only documented the genre’s ability to harness contemporary cultural fears and societal anxieties but have identified horror as a space where historical traumas can be exposed and explored (Blake 2008; Lowenstein 2005).…”

Socio-Pragmatic Functions of Racial Discrimination in Oscar Movie: Get Out

“…The film Get Out is exemplary of this type. When viewed with a critical eye, this horror film sheds light on the challenges black Americans face in the present day and the strategies they employ to survive in a predominantly white country (Pinedo, 2020). It has received a great attention in the recent time and won many Awards from organizations that are concerned with movies evaluation such as Oscar Academy and American Film Institute among many others for they way it deals with a sensitive topic like racial discrimination.…”