Here is my recommended song for this post.

So, after watching Halloween we moved onto our next film of 4. This one was a lot newer and to me more scary, Get Out.

Get Out was a hugely popular film when it came out a few years back and for good reason. It covers a lot of the modern societal aspects of USA, paying tribute to past racism and societal matters and being a genuinely scary movie as well. Who wouldn’t be terrified of seeing a person cut into someone head to remove a brain surgically and implant it into a another person. That is all kinds of wrong.

First off is why and how Get Out is scary. Other than the whole surgical stuff I just mentioned, Get Out uses a lot of classic horror tropes as well utilizing basic filming techniques to make your heart skip a beat.

The two big sources of actual fright was the camera and sound effects/music. Like most horror films they play a huge role in creating that instant fear in the viewer. The script and what is actually said and some of the things that are done are thought of after the fact and are usually much scarier (more on that later). With the camera they use some wide shots to change the perspective of the viewer. One second you’re seeing the world through the eyes of the main character, Chris, the next you are seeing them in a broader scope through the eyes of the gardener/grandpa. They also use close ups to their advantage. The ever famous shot of Get Out is a close up of Chris in a chair with a tear rolling down his cheek. It narrows your focus so you are only paying attention to one little thing that adds to the increasing suspense. On top of the camera there is a heavily effective use of sound and music. The opening track is Redbone by Childish Gambino. Which has lyrics that hint at the film “stay woke” and “don’t close your eyes”. Another great sound was a sudden sharp sound, that made us jump, when a character walked across the screen in a very unexpected moment. It was a sudden unexpected sound that put us on edge and then seeing a character we are already unsure about walk behind the character in the dark. You know we were all taken aback and I was immediately scared.

Now the very curious thing about Get Out is that there isn’t any killing until the last 30 minutes or so of the movie when everything is revealed. Almost all of the movie is the build up of suspense, and let me tell you it is a lot of suspense. The most of the killing that actually occurs is in the act of survival, the main character is the one who kills the most (3). To me while watching the film killing wasn’t at the forefront of the story of the actual horror, I found it to be almost a release. That may sound a little psychopathic but it doesn’t actually really mean much to the overall story. The more prominent killings, are somewhat of a relief because the “bad guys” are the ones killed. Now I lied a little when I said that all the deaths happen at the end, in one of the first scenes we witness a deer get hit by a car. That is our first fright as well actually. The deer was a bit of foreshadowing, there is a scene where Chris looks into the eyes of the dead deer his girlfriend hit and you feel like he almost relates or feels connected to the deer. You don’t really know why at the time but as you move along you slowly understand. He felt a relation between the death of the deer and the death of his mother many years back. The deer also comes back as my favourite weapon but also as a symbol throughout the movie.

Now I’m sure you can tell that Get Out also comments on the social aspect of our current society. It addresses the ideas of racism which is a very current topic today. There are a lot of things pointing towards this in the movie so I recommend watching it to get the full, full story. A few major things stood out to me that influenced what the movie focused on. Currently in our modern society especially in the USA there is a lot of things going on around racism against African-Americans, with police brutality, benevolent racism and the Black Lives Matter movement. In Get Out it was pretty reflective of these things. Chris’s main concern about going to his girlfriends parents house (the main site for the rest of the film) was because he would be the only black person there and how thy might receive that their daughter is dating him. When he arrives the parents appear very welcoming and accepting, even going to the extent to talk about their relation with African-Americans and how they aren’t racist. In modern society there is more of a presence of casual, benevolent racism. We don’t see the whole aggressive white hooded racism that was going on in the last. Nowadays, as shown in the film, we are seeing more of a racism without trying to be. White people are trying to show they support African-Americans but in doing so they are creating a divide through their benevolent racism.

Now comparing this to Frankenstein you can see a similarity in the psychological aspect of horror. Get Out  isn’t a slasher film like Halloween either. There are grotesque scenes but that is not the forefront of the horror. It’s the horror in our minds that make it scary afterwords. The whole general premise of Get Out is that this white family brings in black people, through various means, hypnotized them, kidnaps them, has an auction between old family members, the winner then gets to have their brain transplanted into the black person so their mind can continue to live while their old body dies. The black person is thrown into the “sunken place” where they stay with no control over what they say and do. Pretty creepy right? That to me is the true horror. That whole though of someone hijacking your body with you still inside is really scary. It’s like being forced to have a parasite in your body that has more control over it than you. Another scary aspect of the film is that you have no idea what’s going on until the last 30 minutes. You are given hints over time, building suspense, but you just don’t know until it’s happening right in front of you. Personally the confusion was scary to me because I had no idea what was going on and anything could happen and I would have to face it no matter what. Having to be forced into moving forward without much knowledge was kind of daunting and hugely added to the suspense for me.

Now I did mention earlier about how Get Out is similar to Frankenstein, which it is in the sense of it being a psychological horror. They both also deal with humanity in some way. Frankenstein deals with the idea of what makes us human while Get Out deals with the racism between humans, why and how we divide ourselves based on things we cannot control. Frankenstein is similar because the monster can not control what he looks like just like how we humans can’t change what we look like by way of colour. Get Out though narrows in on the social impacts of this in a modern sense, directly relating modern events to movie events and contents. Another aspect of Get Out  is the behavioural norms of society. The girlfriend’s family acts very strangely, almost robotic. This plays with what we view as acting normal in our society. What does it mean to be acting normal? Where do our expectations lie. When you go to a girlfriend’s family gathering what do you expect? Get Out threw that out the window and gave us the unexpected. Frankenstein addresses that through the lens of the monster and at what point are we functional within human society? At what point does that make us human? There are some similar topics between the two but they are shown and addressed in different ways.

Now onto my favourite part of this, the part where the father is killed with a deer. What, to me, seemed like the funniest part of the movie was the killing of the father. Chris escapes the confines of the psychological prep for his surgery, to be debrained and taken over, he first kills the son with a bocce ball and then proceeds to take a deer head of off a wall and chase down the father, catching him by surprise and running him through with the antlers. Being someone with deer meat in my freezer I found it hilarious to see an alternative use for a hunting trophy.

(Don’t watch if you don’t want to, it does contain blood)

via Gfycat

What was interesting though was the presence of the deer throughout the film. So I did some further research on top of some class discussion. “He praises Rose for hitting the deer and goes on to rant about the entire species and how they ruin the local neighborhoods. To eradicate them is a service to the community, according to Dean. This scene not only sets an odd tone for the rest of Chris’ interactions with the family, but it also primes the audience for what’s to come. We’ve all heard or read this rant before in the comments section of an article about POC. Instead of deer, however, the comments are often aimed at non-white people and how they ruin neighborhoods, how unassimilated they are and how they need to be locked up (or worse) for everyone’s safety. Later in the film, the reveal that the Armitage family appropriates black bodies for the convenience and use of wealthy white society is justified as being for the greater good or, in other words, as a service to the community. Dean’s out-of-place tangent, then, is not just referring to the deer, but what — or whom — it represents to him.” What the deer really is is a symbol for black people as said in the article. This is just one of the symbols used in Get Out. I, personally, didn’t pick up on this until after the film in our class discussion. When Chris looks into the deer’s eyes as it dies he not only is connecting it to a similar experience but the deer is a representation of him. This circles back to that benevolent racism, people are being racist without really thinking about just from what they say and how it is perceived by others. Now in this case the father was actually being racist but I, as the viewer, didn’t pick up on that right away it flew in one ear and out the other.

Get Out has, so far, been one of my favourite horror movies I’ve seen. It kept me engaged the entire movie, from the basics of filming techniques all the way up to the meaning behind the film. It was really interesting to discuss it as a class and think about it on my own and it helped me really see how horror can be such an effective way to deliver and comment on society. I will definitely watch Get Out again and who knows maybe I’ll pick up on something new. Moving forward we will be looking at 2 more movies Frankenstein and Gods and Monsters. They are directly related to the Frankenstein novel (of course) so it will be interesting to see the continuous interpretations on Frankenstein over the course of many, many years.