Dean Armitage preparing for surgery

A very common horror trope is the trope of losing control. This has been done through a variety of things including mind control, curses, ghost or demon possessions. In Get Out the trope is there to create social commentary.

The Armitages employ racist science to excuse their taking control of black people’s bodies.They hunt down and trap black people because of their fetishization of the black body. They and their white clientele believe that while black bodies might be superior, it is because black people are animalistic in nature. That means that they are less than human with animal like brains. To them, that is enough of a justification for their actions. They are removing the “inferior” black brain, leaving just enough for the person to still be conscious in everything they experience, and replacing it with the “superior” white brain, basically enslaving those black people. This enslavement is the real source of horror, the real life example of loss of control that back people are afraid of becoming true once more. The Armitages would agree that slavery was horrendous and claim that they are not racists, being oblivious to how their actions are recreating a new scientific slavery and their choosing black people for their perceived advantages is racist.

The Armitages use science as an excuse to be racists. They believe that race is genetic is because of science saying that we evolved from lesser animals to be the dominant top animal now. The Armitages think that white people are the top animal and black people the bottom animal, so white people have a right in re-enslaving them and using the “resources” black people have to offer, namely their bodies. They are not racist: it’s just science. The painter uses similar “colorblind” racist science by claiming that he does not care for Chris’ skin, only his skills, and employing the brain surgery which promises to undue the issue of race by making black people the puppets of white people who will make them act “white” like they are supposed to act. They all forget, however, that race does not come from genetics but it actually comes from racism. Race comes from practice and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability and premature death.

Inspiration taken by Dorothy Roberts and Denise de Silva. Roberts best discusses this phenomenon of racist science in “The Politics of Race and Science: Conservative Colorblindness and the Limits of Liberal Critique.” De Silva best discusses the concept of othering and fetishizing the black body in “No-bodies: Law, raciality and violence.”

Buck Being Run Over

Many, if not all, horror films begin with the death of an innocent, whether animal or human, to set the tone of the movie, to hint to the future by acting as a parallel to our hero (who is also an innocent), and to function as a warning to the main character.

In one of the first scenes of Get Out, we see a deer jump in front of Rose’s car, causing a car accident, and it inevitably dies in the woods. Chris, hearing the dying cries of the deer, goes to it and sees it die in front of him. The image of the dying deer haunts Chris right after the accident, reminding him of his mother’s death and his failure to save her. As seen in the movie trailer, this image continues to haunt him in his dreams and while he enters the sunken place. So the deer acts as a warning to Chris (it is running away from something), a reminder (of his mother’s death and his guilt), and a parallel (of innocent deaths occurring in the pathway of a white woman).

Inspiration for this post was drawn from Paul Beatriz Preciado. Preciado discusses the concept of animalization and the difference between human and animal in an interview titled ““Feminism Beyond Humanity, Ecology beyond the Environment.”

Chris’s Dead Phone

A horror film without some sort of failure of technology leading to a loss of communication doesn’t exist. Technology, specifically phones, is what keep us connected to each other, it is what offers us a multitude of knowledge at our fingertips within seconds, and it is what makes help be no further than a phone call away. Taking away someone’s phone takes away their connections and their ability to reach out to anyone at a moment’s notice. Being in a scary situation with a phone offers the hero a possible way out. That’s why, it is essential for the antagonist or writer to take that ability away from the hero. This is often done through a lack of cell signal.

For Chris, this lack of communication occurs through his cell phone not having enough battery. His cell phone is essential to his survival and entire experience. He uses it, specifically the flash form its camera, to free the other black people enslaved by the Armitage’s and their white friends. He uses it to keep in touch with Rod, so Rod knows that there is something wrong. He uses it to take a picture of Logan with Rod is then able to use, along with other information and technology, to track him down and save him. It literally is what saves his life by allowing Rod to save him and waking up Walter when Walter has him pinned down.

Chris’s single tool in the entire movie is his cell phone. His strength, although continuously described as superior by the Armitages and their friends, is of little help to him against the power of Missy’s hypnotism. So his cell phone is his only source of useful strength, and he is clever enough to use it to his advantage. So it makes sense that the Armitage’s will want to take the phone away from him by draining the battery and not allowing it to recharge by always unplugging it when Chris isn’t there. By taking away his cell phone, the Armitages both take away his single tool and emphasize how easy it is to cut him off from the world with no consequences. They want no evidence of their crimes, no way for Chris to be tracked back to them and their location, no way for him to be connected to the outside world, so they know that limiting Chris’s uses of the cell phone is the way to do that.

Rose Chasing Chris off Her Lawn with a Shotgun

Black characters occupy a very specific niche of tropes in Horror. The token black character is present as either the best friend comic relief or as a magical/mythical character that realizes the extent of the danger the main character is in (The Shining) whose death is necessary to further the plot or to cement how dire the situation is. Whichever the role, their death is more than likely and is especially painful as there are so few black characters in Horror to begin with.

In Get Out, these tropes are filled and subverted at the same time.

The main character is black and the only trope he fills is that of the Hero. Rod, his best friend, fills in the above-mentioned tropes but with a twist. He is not aware of the real danger that awaits at the Armitage’s house (mind controlled enslavement) but he does voice concern and worry, in a joking tone, to Chris about the racism he will inevitably face at Rose’s white parents’ house. He does joke, he is comedic, but his comedy is to help Chris be less tense and scared while also validating and acknowledging his fears. His knowledge is not of an imagined horror, but the real fear black people have towards white people and especially fear of the white parents of a white partner in an interracial relationship. Rod does not fit the racist “mythical Negro” trope by being a shaman, a voodoo doctor, or somehow supernatural in his warnings, but by relaying to the audience his and Chris’s real, valid fears.

The tropes are subverted through black characters surviving the film as Heroes while the white people die (a well-deserved death) as villains. When the black characters die, it is heartbreaking, it is outrageous, because they did not deserve to die, but their deaths are not to let the audience and hero know how dire the circumstances are, to create sentimentality, or drive the hero to fight harder (Chris is fighting for escape, for survival, and he only stops to help Georgina because of guilt about his mother’s death and kinship).Their deaths are there to show why Chris was/is afraid of white people, how racism isn’t over, and that for them death was an escape, a better alternative, to a life of enslavement under rich, white people that fetishize their “subhuman/animal” attributes.

The white characters rely on these tropes and the idea that no one will care if a black person has gone missing to torture and enslave black people. Even in this world, as we see through Rod’s interaction with the police, the police, even if black, does not care if a black man has gone missing and won’t take the worries of another black man seriously (they don’t even seem to care about Logan being found and acting out of character). However, in the end, they are wrong about the premise of the movie they are in. This is not a white fantasy/horror about white heroes; it is a horror film about the horrors white people cause with a black hero.

Chris does not die and neither does Rod, the comic relief. They survive. Chis is scared but he survives. They are free and they bring hope with them. Hope for them, for other black people the Armitage’s have enslaved, and for the audience. Peele puts it best in an interview he did with Variety Today:

In the beginning, when I was first making this movie the idea was, ‘Okay, we’re in this post-racial world, apparently.’ That was the whole idea… So the ending in that era was meant to say, ‘Look, you think race isn’t an issue? Well at the end, we all know this is how this movie would end right here… [As time passed] It was very clear that the ending needed to transform into something that gives us a hero, that gives us an escape, gives us a positive feeling when we leave this movie.

Armitage Family Bingo and the Prize

As discussed on the home page of “Horror Tropes,” most horror movies have been created with the white imaginary and fear in mind. Horror movies have been asking what does an ideal white life look like, how can we interrupt it, and what are the white fears we can use to interrupt it. That mindset does not leave much room for people of color in horror movies apart from fodder for the violence.

Get Out flips this white focus on its heads in two ways.

First, the movie does not revolve around white fears. The movie focuses on what black people fear. What do white people fear? Demons, werewolves, ghosts, ax murderers, (black people) etc. What do black people fear? White people. Specifically, white people hurting them, killing them, enslaving them, and being powerless to defend themselves against any of that because the white people are using the system (police, the state, laws, etc) to control them. Peele focused on those fears and made them visible, showing that white supremacy and racism still exist and white people have a lot of power over black people in society.

Second, the movie focuses on the white fear of being perceived as racist. The Armitages, violent as they are towards black people, do not want to be perceived as racist. They try to act “normal” and the father, Dean, uses language like “man” to finish his sentences, that he thinks sounds black and would put Chris at ease before he takes away his life. Dean claims that he loves Obama and would have voted for him a third time, something which Rose also mentions to prove that her family isn’t racist. One of the clients claims that Tiger Woods is his favorite golfer and a great guy. A different client claims that being black is now cool. The blind photographer claims to not see or care for color, being colorblind. Rose dismisses Chris’ real fears of meetings her parents as silly because they obviously could not be racist at this age and time. All those actions are supposed to say, “Look at me, I am not racist! I love black people! Racism is dead!” But racism isn’t dead and Peele uses this denial and white fear of being called racist to make the audience aware of that fact. The colorblindness, the microaggressions, the fetishization, the state violence, the actual violence, are all signs that we don’t live in a post-racial society and we never will as long as differences create profit for the state and benefit those in power.

Inspiration for this post came from Zakiyyah Jackson and Treva Ellison. Jackson discusses the concept pf post-humanism, and so the white fear of racism,  and colorblindness in “Animal: New directions in the theorization of race and posthumanism.” discusses carceral feminism and issues of the state and police in “The Strangeness of Progress.”