After Peele: Get Out’s Influence on the Horror Genre and Beyond

Abstract

In a 2021 article for The New York Times, Gabrielle Bellot seeks to explain “How Black Horror Became America’s Most Powerful Cinematic Genre.” The lead image features a now iconic close-up of Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), the protagonist of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, paralyzed with fear. His eyes appear almost grotesquely widened, his mouth hangs agape, and tears stream down his face. The moment, of course, comes from one of the film’s most powerful scenes in which Chris gets hypnotized and then cast down into “the sunken place,” a metaphysical plane of Black subjection that has since become pop culture shorthand for endemic racial oppression. Peele’s landmark feature has already prompted a considerable body of scholarly analysis from critics such as Joshua Bennett, Dawn Keetley et al., Alison Landsberg, Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Francesca Sobande, and others. Although these studies offer a rich array of critical interpretations, they all confirm that Get Out marks a vital moment in the history of horror because of how it centers the inner life of its Black protagonist and because of the incisiveness with which it targets liberal white racism as a source of monstrosity. As Robin Means Coleman has argued, Black horror films can be distinguished from “Blacks in horror” films by the former’s prioritization of Black experience, characters, culture, community concerns, and more careful attention to the fraught history of raced representation both within and beyond the genre (7). Get Out indeed goes to great lengths to present itself as a Black horror film invested in Blackness (and in Black audiences) rather than as a Blacks in horror film that likely would not have resonated in the same ways. In this essay, however, I am less interested in offering another reading of Get Out than in further exploring its impact on the horror genre more broadly. Could we have even imagined an article title like Bellot’s prior to Get Out’s release? Would any critic have been willing to make such an audacious claim about the power of any single cinematic genre as Bellot does if not for Get Out’s momentous critical and commercial success? The answer seems like an emphatic no. Bellot’s