Get Out (2017)
Directed by Jordan Peele
Chris and his girlfriend Rose go upstate to visit her parents for the weekend. At first, Chris reads the family's overly accommodating behavior as nervous attempts to deal with their daughter's interracial relationship, but as the weekend progresses, a series of increasingly disturbing discoveries lead him to a truth that he never could have imagined.
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What critics say influenced Get Out
Get Out takes the initial premise of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and then twists it with The Stepford Wives to create a compelling, thoughtful critique of white power.
That is part of Get Out ’s problem and the joy of the film: the work is its own “thinkpiece,” while borrowing genre notes from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner , The Stepford Wives, and Being John Malkovich .
“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” meets “The Stepford Wives” in “ Get Out ,” in which a white girl brings her black boyfriend home to meet her parents, whose superficially warm welcome masks an unthinkably dark secret.
Suffice it to say that Peele has created his own horror-fied version of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner that fearlessly goes for broke in a third act that ratchets up the insanity of Chris’ predicament.
A popular reference I’ve seen pointed out is Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), though I would update its mention by acknowledging The Dinner Game (1998) in the same breath.
It certainly takes cues from cinematic history, and could be elevator pitched as "The Stepford Wives meets Guess Who's Coming To Dinner," but with a playful sense of tone, amazing performances, and a sharp bite, it resonates with you long after you've left the theater.
To be fair, Peele is clearly riffing on some films he has seen before, including “The Stepford Wives” and “ Rosemary’s Baby ,” although with a charged, racial twist.
Rose’s parents throw a party for their wealthy white neighbors, who show up looking like Satanic extras from “Rosemary’s Baby,” and who proceed to assail Chris with their country-club manners and moronic attempts at conversation.
Cinematically, Peele draws influences from The Stepford Wives, Rosemary’s Baby and anything where a secret collective hides behind their portrait of cheery perfection.
“Get Out” is a cutting-edge, fresh and sometimes bat-bleep-crazy mash-up of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” and “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Stepford Wives,” with dashes of John Carpenter’s “They Live,” among other films, mixed in for good measure.
Writer-director Jordan Peele is best known as a comedian (he was the Peele in Comedy Central's Key & Peele), but he is also a horror-movie fiend, and is aiming here for the escalating, vise-tightening tension of movies he’s admired (his influences include Rosemary’s Baby, and he’s named his female lead Rose).
Just as “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Stepford Wives” transformed the genre into panicky feminist fantasias, this becomes a mind trip of interracial mistrust.
Mixing horror and comedy is no easy task (it took Roman Polanski to whiff with "The Fearless Vampire Killers" before he could make his masterpiece "Rosemary's Baby") and Peele's first feature is strong.
One has to wonder whether Peele is a fan of Brian Yuzna’s 1989 “Society” and Wes Craven’s 1991 “The People Under the Stairs,” since there are echoes of both here.
It’s the kind of film that couldn’t come from within the Hollywood machine (see: George Clooney’s Oscar acceptance speech), and, considering that it has been twenty-five years since Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs , one of the paltry few horror movies with a black lead which acts as a direct commentary on white suburbia, it’s long overdue.
(The Stepford Wives is the obvious reference point, but it might also remind you of, say, The People Under the Stairs.)
Wes Craven patterning the inner city-exploiting villains of The People Under the Stairs after Ronald and Nancy Reagan, for instance, was clearly a conscious choice.
Although dated, Scream might be the best analog.
While this may not seem like a mind-blowing moment to begin a film with, it airs a resemblance to Wes Craven’s Scream , where characters within the film make fun of a situation they may find themselves in and the ridiculous reactions that typically ensue.
Its dark sense of humor — along with its opening scene of an unsettling crime — owes a debt to the "Scream" franchise.
He provides some much needed comic relief, essentially acting as the voice of the audience, whilst also demonstrating an intelligence rarely seen by horror movie characters; he’s like Randy from Scream , but without having to be annoyingly meta.
“Get Out” isn’t a spoof like Wes Craven’s “Scream” or Wayans’ “Scary Movie;” Peele isn’t satirizing the genre but society at large.
The action starts out with a “Scream”-ready preface in which a young African-American man (Lakeith Stanfield) is attacked on a leafy suburban street and abducted by a man in a mask.
Like the equally memorable opening scene of the recent horror movie It Follows , the initial moments of Get Out are a reminder that no matter how domestic and low-key the film becomes at other times, it’s first and foremost a horror movie, with an agenda of unsettling the audience, then scaring the hell out of them.
The latest in a great craze of social parable horror (It Follows, Under the Shadow), Jordan Peele’s Get Out begins by turning America’s racist-stereotype of “black man as a threat” into a black man threatened.
"Get Out" nestles into similar territory as recent auteur horror films "It Follows" and "The Witch," which transcend the genre by blending classical dread and shocks with comedy and/or big ideas.
The social critique has lately felt more pointed than usual, with recent popular horror movies about sex ( It Follows , The Witch ), motherhood ( The Babadook ), bullying ( Unfriended ), and even white supremacy ( Green Room ) reminding us that what counts as horror is often simply a matter of who we are.
At the same time, good horror films still preserve visceral terrors: the creepalicious soundtrack of Marienbad , the inexorable march of death in It Follows , and the primal superstition in Babadook that words have more than symbolic power.
A night-time sequence, in which Walter runs out of the darkness towards Chris, has the same sense of American gothic dread as David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows , while the humour vacillates between the broader strokes of Rusty Cundieff’s underrated Tales from the Hood and the insidious cruelty of Lars von Trier’s Manderlay .
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And he demonstrates few first-feature jitters, establishing his confidence behind the camera in an opening abduction that puts a culturally pointed spin on the predatory cinematography and deceptively safe residential backdrop of John Carpenter’s Halloween.
We’re meant to think of Halloween .
The opening scene here, with a black kid being stalked on a late-night suburban street, recalls the classic leafy menace of John Carpenter's Halloween ; and parts of the rest of the film echo such earlier fright flicks as Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives .
And, if I may, if Blumhouse is going to support and distribute and support the likes of Get Out and The Purge, I'm very willing to let them have their easy money with a Halloween reboot or whatever becomes of M. Night Shyamalan's Split sequel.
He uses the wide screen like John Carpenter in Halloween, to lull but decenter you.
“Get Out” is a cutting-edge, fresh and sometimes bat-bleep-crazy mash-up of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” and “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Stepford Wives,” with dashes of John Carpenter’s “They Live,” among other films, mixed in for good measure.
A horror film with the power to put a rascally grin on the face of that great genre subverter John Carpenter (They Live), Get Out has more fun playing with half-buried racial tensions than with scaring us to death.
But what makes the timely thriller worth a mention alongside social commentaries such as They Live and Night of the Living Dead is the filmmaker’s way of immersing an audience in the viewpoint of young photographer Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) and the nasty business he stumbles into during a seemingly vanilla family get-together.
Filled with righteous anger, sly wit and genuine creepiness, “Get Out” is a savvy, stylish and enormously entertaining film that deserves a place on the same shelf as such other great politically charged horror films as John Carpenter’s “They Live” and the zombie films of George Romero.
Among its most obvious ancestors are "The Stepford Wives," "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," "They Live," "The 'Burbs" and "Rosemary's Baby" — stories in which the harrowing menace comes wrapped in a bland, neighborly smile.
Peele also draws inspiration from Stanley Kubrick, most obviously when the man in the opening scene compares the suburban streets to “a fucking hedge maze ,” but also in the hallucinatory scenes in which Chris is placed under hypnosis by Rose’s psychiatrist mother (Catherine Keener), which feature images of Chris tumbling off into space that are soundtracked by micropolyphonic chanting reminiscent of the Györgi Ligety music Kubrick used in 2001: A Space Odyssey .
Among them are Night of the Living Dead, Funny Games, The Silence of the Lambs, The Shining, and the film I couldn’t stop thinking about while watching this one: Rosemary’s Baby .
The film pays homage to such classics as The Stepford Wives , The Shining , and Night of the Living Dead , slowly building the viewer’s creeping suspicion that Something Is Not Right.
Many memorable horror films, from The Shining to the first (and actually great) Paranormal Activity , make our hearts race when the protagonist begins to sense that Someone Is Watching.
The lurking presence of Rose’s odd brother ( Caleb Landry Jones ), who often looks like he’s auditioning for a remake of “ A Clockwork Orange ,” doesn’t help.
Being a Peele joint, “Get Out” has the occasional LOL bit, usually involving the ad-libbing of Lil Rey Howley, as Chris’ TSA bestie, who tells him over the phone to get out of there before things turn “Eyes Wide Shut.”
This film is reminiscent of Skeleton Key , Stepford Wives and Scream – even giving a nod to the ultimate man of thrillers Alfred Hitchcock, with the music following the opening scene briefly reminiscent of Psycho .
Peele also is inspired by all the right stuff - the something's-not-right vibe of "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Stepford Wives," the insularity and eerie choral soundtrack cues of "Suspiria," nods to "Psycho" taxidermy and "Deliverance" banjo plucking.
Influenced by films like The Stepford Wives, Rosemary’s Baby , Night of the Living Dead and a bit of Psycho , Get Out is a film based on a reality that touches upon a real social climate.
The gradual unraveling of evil feels akin to Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, especially considering the balance of tension and dark humor.
It doesn’t seem like a coincidence, for example, that Chris uses the same weapon (a camera and flash) as the paranoid hero of Hitchcock’s Rear Window.
In doing this, Peele references and draws upon the techniques of classic scary movies (Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead), thrillers (Rear Window), and comedy and social problem movies (The ’Burbs).
Get Out is searing satire, with scary/comic riffs on slavery and assimilation, but it’s also a smashing crowd-pleaser of a horror film, complete with mad science, cult-like crazies, and a creep-out homage to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin.
His economical style is paired with moments of surreal beauty, particularly in his poetic visualisation – perhaps in homage to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin – of a hypnosis session in which Missy kindly offers Chris some free therapy to cure his nasty smoking habit.
Peele takes some pointers from Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin to build our sense of queasy apprehension.
He does indeed end up being hypnotized, put into a state that Missy refers to as “the sunken place,” and Peele visualizes it as a vast ocean of darkness, in a touch that recalls the dead-end abysses of Under the Skin while finding its own unique notes of helplessness.
It is not only the best horror film since “Under the Skin” (2013), but a subversive and often hilarious commentary on race as well.
In scenes reminiscent of the underrated 2013 Jonathan Glazer shocker “Under the Skin,” Missy hypnotizes Chris and sends him to an outer-space-like place beneath.
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Peele has counted the thrillers of Ira Levin (writer of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives) among his inspirations, and most of Get Out finds Chris uncertain whether he’s the victim in a horror plot — or whether everyone just acts bizarre around him.
Ira Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives , would have cracked a wry smile at the cackling satire of this chilling “social thriller”, the directorial debut from MadTV alumnus Jordan Peele.
Mashing up Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner with Ira Levin stories like Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives , it’s a sickly hilarious skewering of liberal paternalism in which white condescension reveals sinister ends.
A reconfiguration of 1975’s The Stepford Wives , the Bryan Forbes adaptation of the Ira Levin novel, about a community of white suburban housewives who become hollowed out robots for their passive aggressive husbands, Peele brings his own new twists to a similar idea.
Slivers of Ira Levin's "The Stepford Wives," and a hint of L.Q.
A popular reference I’ve seen pointed out is Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), though I would update its mention by acknowledging The Dinner Game (1998) in the same breath.