Get Out

This film is now up there with some of my favourite films. It’s masterfully crafted to create a psychological horror using a bunch of horror tropes to create a story that feels like a labyrinth. If you have not watched the film, I would highly suggest watching it before you read this. Some of the best moments in the film are created by using deception.
The horror in this film comes through the constant build of tension with the unexpected twists letting us get lost in the story because we are constantly reassessing what we know about the story. The moment that demonstrated this for me was the auction scene. As we believe the story has slowed for a minute with Chris finding getting away from the people who have been creating the tension. Then start to attempt to “escape” through telling Rose about the hypnotism her mother did. Then we find out that everyone other than Chris and Rose is against Chris creating a scenario that makes us feel the impending doom of the situation.

This way of building tension is permutated across the film and never really ends until the final scenes. This, in my opinion, is the central horror of the film, but it uses everything from jumps scares to helplessness. So well, at first glance, there is next to no resemblance to many other films in the horror genre. If you look a bit deeper, you can see there marks being placed on it. A moment that I believe captures the hided horror troops well is the moment at the beginning of the film where they drive up to the house. We get a shot of the pulling up from the gardener’s point of view, which felt very reminiscent of the shots in Halloween shot from Micheal Myres’s perspective.

I feel like I’m starting to ramble on because there is so much that I want to comment on. One of those things is the deer. Even if you saw the film, you may have no clue what in the world I’m talking about because the deer is a hidden story. The story starts before they even get to the house when they hit a deer. Once they get to the house, the father speaks about the deer problem in the neighbourhood saying remakes reminiscent of what would have been said in southern states in the 1950s. Then at the end of the film, the father is squired by the taxidermied deer on the wall. This “mini-story” was confirmed in an interview with Jordan Peele on Vanity Fair.

Overall I believe this film is an excellent combination of the Internal horror found in films like Frankenstein and the slashers troops to create a great movie.