FROM THE BOOK

So why do blacks love horror so much? As Get Out shows us explicitly, horror is an excellent mechanism to visualize, confront, and try to overcome racial trauma. I inherited my own love for the genre from my late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due. She wore dark glasses for the rest of her life after a Tallahassee, Florida, police officer threw a teargas cannister in her face during a peaceful protest march in 1960. The Universal Pictures horror classics she raised me on, like Dracula and The Fly, often had no black characters at all. I believe my mother’s attraction to horror was driven by the same reasons Get Out was so effective as an artistic vehicle for conveying racial trauma—because we’re a minority surrounded by “whiteness,” which often proves to be hostile or fearful, horror can serve as a coping mechanism by helping us visualize allegorical monsters, as well as offering release and lessons on survival and rebellion against seemingly overwhelming forces. One movie I watched with my mother as a child was The Mole People (1956), about researchers who discover an underground world when dark, monstrous mole-like people pull them down into the soil. Although I was originally frightened by them—as intended—when I saw their human overseers whipping and mistreating them, I grasped—even as a child—the slavery metaphor, so I rejoiced when they rebelled. In watching horror, my mother and I sometimes empathized with the white actors fighting off the monsters, and sometimes we empathized with the monsters that were shunned and hunted by society. Either way, watching scary movies was my mother’s way of escaping the horrors of racism, and she passed that love on to me.
The key to the power of Get Out lies in both Peele’s intention on the screen and the needs of the black horror audience it was created to serve. As Peele has said, “I made Get Out for everybody in the audience. I didn’t want anybody to see it and not get it. But I really made it for black audiences. If black audiences didn’t get it, didn’t like it, that’s a fail.” In addition to telling the story of Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), whose weekend with the family of his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) devolves into a nightmare of racialized abduction and sci-fi body snatching, Get Out redresses decades of erasure, abuse, clichés, and damaging tropes that have stained horror cinema, Hollywood, and American history.
Many black moviegoers love horror and have for generations. Horror gives black movie audiences an opportunity to experience danger without a true cost, releasing tension and creating community against imaginary monsters while we groan at protagonists who walk toward the danger instead of running away from it. As Richard Pryor said in his classic 1974 routine about The Exorcist, if black people had been in that cast, “The movie would have been about seven minutes long, as soon as the devil spoke: ‘Helloooooooo.’ GOODBYE.” As Peele has said, “I think that often it’s a stereotype, but a true stereotype, the idea of the black horror fans being very vocal about how dumb the lead character is being. I think this comes from frustration of lack of representation, not just of our skin, but our sensibility.”
Instead of rewarding our love for the genre, too often horror films either have erased us or shown us only contempt. From the “monstrous” blackfaced Gus in The Birth of a Nation to Scatman Crothers’ wasted sacrifice in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to the white-woman-obsessed Candyman, horror often has fallen far short of its potential for meaningful portrayals of black people. Lack of representation in film—horror being no exception—is a hostile act of erasure.
The particular genius of Get Out is the way in which it serves as both a reflection of African Americans’ most enduring fears and traumas, and to hold a mirror to the face of white society, particularly white liberals, who can identify their own problematic attitudes and behaviors, such as cough-like reflexes conjuring references to Barack Obama or Tiger Woods in response to meeting someone with black skin. Or their infatuation with black slang and culture to mask discomfort and racism, foster false rapport, or minimize their privilege.
And the premise of Get Out bridges black and white audiences through the introduction of Chris and Rose’s interracial relationship—the most explosive pairing in the fault line of U.S. racial history…
—By Tananarive Due