Hello, Internet.

About two years ago, a friend of mine called me up (or, more likely, texted me) to ask if I wanted to go see a movie. The movie she had in mind wasn’t one I knew much about, except that it was a horror film, it was directed by comedian Jordan Peele, and it was called Get Out.

For the first half of the movie, I was completely enthralled – and horrified. Somewhere towards the latter half I lost track of the plot, not really comprehending the events that rapidly spiralled out on the screen.

Get Out stayed in my peripheral vision in the following years; I heard that it did well, and that Jordan Peele since directed another horror film called Us, but I didn’t think about it too much otherwise.

It was called back to the forefront of my attention last week when we watched it in class, and this time I was much less confused – but just as enthralled.

The setup for Get Out is this: an African American man, Chris, and his white girlfriend, Rose, are planning to visit Rose’s parents for the weekend. Her parents don’t know that Chris is black, as Rose claims it won’t be a big deal because they aren’t racist. Chris is wary, but he agrees to go meet them for the weekend anyways, and so the two set out on their way.

Before any of this happens, however, the movie opens with a seemingly unrelated scene. We see a man walking alone at night. He’s black, fairly young, making his way down a suburban street. He’s clearly uncomfortable, muttering out loud that the area is “a hedge maze”, and saying in a conversation over the phone that it’s “creepy”. A car slows down, apparently following him. Noticing this, he turns around and starts walking in the opposite direction, proclaiming aloud, “Not me. Not today.” He checks behind him to see if the car has turned as well. It hasn’t.

Instead, it’s completely stopped, doors open, Run Rabbit Run playing on the radio. A man in a mask appears, strangles the first man until he stops struggling, shoves him in the trunk of the car, gets in, and drives away.

This scene, like the rest of the movie, is informed by current American events. The man walking is uncomfortable even before the car slows down and starts following him, and not without reason. Suburbs like the one he’s walking through are often predominantly white, and it’s not uncommon for black men to be reported to the police, injured, or killed by racist white people who see them as a threat – like in the case of Trayvon Martin, a seventeen year old fatally shot for, it seems, being a black man in a suburban neighbourhood. Unlike in other horror films,where the suburbs are seen as a safe place being encroached upon by killers, here the suburbs themselves, and the regular inhabitants thereof, present the danger.

As the car drives away, the sound of Run Rabbit Run fades out, and a few string chords take its place as the scene transitions to the title sequence: shots of the forest along the road to Rose’s parents house, accompanied by a Swahili song called Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga. The lyrics, translated to English, are as follows:

They seem to be encouraging the listener to do the same thing as the movie’s title: get out. However, the eerie music is quickly replaced as the title sequence ends. This time, Childish Gambino’s Redbone plays as we are finally introduced to Chris, Rose, and their prospective road trip. The song’s hook of “stay woke” seems to be both another warning that something dangerous is going to happen, and an ironic nod to the non- nblack people throughout the movie who think that they’re being “woke” while actually mistreating Chris.

So, Chris and Rose are driving to Rose’s parents house and they hit a deer. They pull over, and Chris gets out to take a look at the dying deer, lying a few feet off the road. He looks at it; it looks back at him. They seem to have a moment of solidarity.

Cut to a policeman standing by the car, telling Rose to call animal services in the future, not the police. Rose apologizes, and then the policeman turns his attention to Chris, and asks to see his driver’s licence. Rose protests, saying Chris wasn’t driving, while Chris attempts to politely comply with the police officer. Eventually, Rose gets the policeman to back down and drive away, and Rose and Chris continue driving.

This is another scene that very blatantly comments on a major issue in America: racial profiling. Police will wrongly stop, accuse, hurt, or kill people of colour (usually black people) without proper cause, often not facing serious consequences.

Once they’ve reached Rose’s parents’ house, we are introduced to her father, Dean, and her mother, Missy, and quickly learn that the rest of Rose’s relatives are going to be there for the weekend as well. At the same time, we meet Walter (the groundskeeper) and Georgina (the maid), both black. Both of them act strange throughout the day, speaking and dressing very formally, and in a style reminiscent of the 1950s.

We learn that Dean is a neurosurgeon, and Missy is a hypnotist, who later hypnotizes Chris to get him to stop smoking. While he is hypnotized, we learn that his mother was killed in a car accident when he was a child, as he sat at home watching TV.

Chris has various conversations with Dean and Missy, as well as Rose’s brother Jeremy, who arrives that night. All three of them appear initially to be, as Rose said, not racist, but through a series of microaggressions it quickly becomes apparent that they aren’t as progressive as they think. Chris has a similar experience with Rose’s extended family, with many of her relatives fixating on the fact that he is black, and making insensitive comments. Eventually, Chris finds the one other black man there (save for Walter). His name is Logan, and like Walter and Georgina, he speaks formally and dresses in outdated clothes – including a hat reminiscent of the one worn by Emmett Till in this well known photo of him.

Chris, a photographer, snaps a photo of Logan with his phone, not realizing the flash is on. When it goes off, Logan suddenly freaks out, grabbing Chris and yelling at him to “get out”. He is led away by some other relatives, then comes back, calm again, and apologizes, saying he had a seizure. Chris and Rose go for a walk, while Dean leads the other relatives in a game of bingo that is eerily reminiscent of a slave auction. Chris decides he wants to go home because he is feeling creeped out, and Rose agrees to go with him. Meanwhile, Chris sends a picture of Logan to his friend Rod, saying he recognized him, and Rod identifies Logan as being a man named Andre who disappeared a few months earlier.

Chris and Rose are packing up to leave when Chris finds a box in the closet with a stack of photos of Rose with different black guys, generally looking to be ex boyfriends, despite the fact that she had told him he was the first black man she had dated. Chris becomes more urgent to leave, but Rose can’t find the car keys – and then it’s revealed that she actually has them, but isn’t willing to give them to him. She and her family stop Chris from leaving, knock him out, and he awakes tied to a chair, watching a TV.

On the TV, a man explains that the family has invented a procedure called the Coagula: a way for someone’s consciousness to be transferred into another body, while keeping that body’s original consciousness dormant. The family has been abducting young black people and transferring the consciousnesses of elderly members of the family into the younger bodies to preserve them. Walter, Georgina, and Logan – who is actually the man we saw kidnapped at the start – are all elderly members of Rose’s family inhabiting young, black bodies. While the reason given for them using specifically black people is that members of the family thought they would be cooler or stronger, it would also be easier for them, as things like the abduction in the first scene go more easily unreported than if a white person went missing in the same spot.

Chris is repeatedly knocked out through the use of the sound and image of a spoon clinking in a teacup, which Missy used to hypnotize him. He escapes by putting cotton in his ears, and fighting the family members one on one, until he has killed all of them except Rose, who is upstairs. She hears the commotion, and comes downstairs with a rifle, attempting to kill him. He gets in Jeremy’s car (the same car from the beginning of the film) and tries to drive away, but he hits Georgina and, feeling guilty about not having saved his mother as a child, decides he can’t leave her. He puts her unconscious body in the passenger seat, and she wakes up and attacks him. He fights her off, and is still pursued by Rose and Walter, when he uses the flash on his phone to bring Walter back to his senses, at which point Walter shoots Rose and then himself. However, Rose is still alive, and as Chris is attempting to kill her before she kills him, a police car pulls up. It seems that Chris is going to be killed by the police.

It turns out that the driver of the police car is Chris’s friend Rod, a TSA agent, who has been piecing the whole thing together based on what Chris has told him. The two drive off to safety, and the film closes.

While I was writing this post, I pulled up a copy of the film’s script, which had a few differences to the actual film, most notably in the opening scene and at the very end. Instead of just focusing on Andre walking alone at the start, the scene is interspersed with scenes of a white family preparing to go to DisneyWorld:

A perfect suburban house with bay windows and a front lawn. The SHAW family. Caucasian and warm – RICHARD, 34; NANCY, 30; JOSHUA, 6; and MAY, 4 – eat dinner inside. Richard reads something on his tablet illuminating his face.

JOSHUA: Which one are we going to?

RICHARD: The one in Orlando.

NANCY Disney World.

JOSHUA: Tony said that Mickey is not really Mickey; it’s someone else in there.

RICHARD: Mickey’s Mickey.

JOSHUA: Tony said Mickey’s face doesn’t move.

RICHARD: That’s right. Mickey’s always happy.

EXT. SUBURBAN STREET – CONTINUOUS The driver carries Andre to the car.

JOSHUA (O.S.): Why?

RICHARD (O.S.): Because he hasn’t aged in 100 years.

It’s chilling. Then and again, pretty much everything in this film is chilling, as it conveys a very present fear: racism in America, specifically internalized racism by people who claim to be “woke”. Much of the tension throughout the film is built up through examples of everyday racism, until it’s eventually revealed that everything is part of a bigger, more sinister operation.

As for the end of the film, the script has the whole police-showing-up thing played much more grimly, ending with Chris getting arrested and going to prison, as Rod still searches for evidence of what really happened. Chris, however, is happy knowing that he was able to defeat Rose and her family.

Get Out is a modern and innovative film, but it still has similarities to the roots of horror. Like in Frankenstein, it shows someone being outcast by society for the way they look – and, in the original ending of the film, Chris is literally penalized for killing the people who were attacking him, much like Frankenstein vows revenge on his creature for his actions. They have similarities from a science fiction angle too, with the horror of someone playing God and essentially controlling the body of another person, via reanimation in Frankenstein and the coagula in Get Out.

Overall, Get Out was an excellent and creepy film that I really enjoyed watching, even if it took me a couple tries to fully understand the plot.

Anyways, until next time –

Toodles.

Hello, Internet.

I would like to ask that, for a moment, you cast your mind back to the late 1970s – specifically 1970s America. A lot of change was happening. Serial killers such as Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy were terrorizing the country, the Vietnam war had ended, Apple and Microsoft had just gotten their start, Roe v Wade had recently legalized abortion, Richard Nixon had resigned after the Watergate Scandal, and after years of fighting, the Equal Rights Amendment had been ratified. If you were a conservative in America, you were probably pretty afraid. If you were pretty much anyone else – a woman, a person of colour, a queer person, or just someone who was fighting for a civil rights movement – things were perhaps starting to get a little better (except for, of course, that whole serial killer thing, which wasn’t good for anyone).

Meanwhile, a lot of cultural events were reflected in pop culture. Apocalypse Now portrayed the horrors of the Vietnam War, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest focused on the institutionalization and mistreatment of mentally ill people, One Day At A Time centred around a divorced mother raising her children, and Black Christmas, a horror movie about several young girls being murdered, has a young, pregnant protagonist who is planning to get an abortion.

In 1978, inspired heavily by Black Christmas, director John Carpenter released a movie called Halloween.

Halloween is a simple movie: a six year old boy murders his sister, is locked up for fifteen years, escapes, and kills four more people. Meanwhile, his doctor, Sam Loomis, tracks him down to attempt to stop him from hurting anyone. For a slasher movie, it’s relatively bloodless; there are only five deaths, only four of which are onscreen, two of which are strangling, and one of which is heavily obscured. There are no fountains of fake blood, or gruesome torture sequences. Even if the creators had wanted to include these things, they didn’t have the budget for it.

Halloween was made for about $300k, provided by producer Moustapha Akkad. This meant many of the actors were not well-known, and that the cast and crew were generally underpaid, and most of the props and costumes were decided by what could be obtained cheaply – most famously, the mask worn by Michael Myers is actually a mask of William Shatner that was altered to look scarier and less human, costing the crew less than five dollars. Actress Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, was hired in the lead role of Laurie Strode, giving the film a lot of publicity. Most of the film was not gore and violence, but just shots of various characters walking or driving around, talking, and being teenagers, while the movie’s score played in the background, never quite letting the audience forget that something terrible is about to happen.

The score was composed by John Carpenter. It’s sort of a weird piece – it’s in 10/8 timing (each measure is composed of ten eighth notes, which is fairly unusual), which makes it sound slightly off kilter and very distinctive; it has a very high melody juxtaposed with low synth chords, which sounds unnatural and alarming; and there’s an ominous ticking sound throughout the entire thing that is reminiscent of a clock counting away the seconds.

It’s incredibly effective. In fact, the audio is a large part of why the film works. Aside from the score, which has now become iconic, you can hear the sound of Michael breathing through the mask throughout the film (which is essentially the only sound he makes, since he never speaks). At one point, we hear a character being choked to death over the phone (a scene that would later be referenced in the opening of Wes Craven’s Scream). Once Michael starts attacking Laurie, we hear the scream that gave Jamie Lee Curtis the title of “scream queen”. All of this together is terrifying.

Of course, the audio isn’t the only thing the film utilizes to create a sense of horror. Another strong point in terms of style for Halloween is camerawork. In particular, the scenes from Michael Myers’ perspective – one extended POV shot at the beginning that puts you inside the killer’s head while he stabs his sister to death, and hides the fact that he is a six year old child until after he has murdered her, and several shots throughout the movie that show his perspective as he watches characters from behind hedges or outside windows, all with the sound of breathing in the background.

While the audio and camerawork lend themselves to the terror of Halloween, they are only supporting factors in the thing that truly makes the film scary: the fact that it could be real. When Halloween was released, slasher movies weren’t really a thing the way they are today. There were a few– Psycho is a sort of early template, and the aforementioned Black Christmas – but they wouldn’t be popularized until after Halloween’s release. What was common in horror movies prior to this was the supernatural: demons and possession, or monsters such as vampires and werewolves. It was all fantasy. Halloween shows a terrifying scenario that is very much a reality: a human being, a child, doing great evil. It’s a very naturalistic movie. The setting of Haddonfield, Illinois doesn’t exist – it’s a classic Everytown, America. It could be any town. It could be your town.

The characters in the movie feel real as well. Debra Hill, Carpenter’s wife at the time, co-wrote the movie, and she and Carpenter wanted to make sure that the teenagers acted and talked and dressed like real teenagers. The women weren’t meant to be meek and void of personality and essentially there to be viewed, as women were often portrayed in movies – they were given agency, desires, and in the case of Laurie Strode, enough resourcefulness and willingness to fight to fend off a killer using a knitting needle, a coat hanger, and his own weapon. The movie has sometimes been interpreted as misogynistic for killing off all the female characters who are shown drinking and having sex, while allowing the more conservative, booksmart, virginal Laurie to live and defeat the villain. However, this was apparently not an intentional commentary, and John Carpenter, Debra Hill, and Jamie Lee Curtis have all mentioned that the characters are meant to be realistic teenagers, not a portrayal of what teenagers (or women) should or shouldn’t be. (Not to mention, Laurie is shown swearing, smoking pot, helping her friends to shirk their babysitting duties in favour of using the empty houses they now have access to for their own enjoyment, and it’s mentioned that she has a crush but has trouble getting a boyfriend – she’s not exactly trying to be angelic, she’s just a little dorky). The idea of teenagers being killed for drinking or having sex would be portrayed more explicitly in Friday the Thirteenth, a copycat slasher film released in 1980, and the idea of an innocent final girl surviving would be echoed in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare On Elm Street, and deconstructed in his later movie Scream.

Another thing that made Halloween scary is the utter lack of explanation for Michael’s actions. He doesn’t seem to have a specific motivation – in fact, he doesn’t seem especially motivated at all. He walks slowly, he shows no emotion, he kills people at random. At one point, upon finding a dog that Michael has killed, Loomis says simply, “he got hungry”. Seemingly, then, Michael is just acting on his whims. He isn’t killing people out of a need for revenge or to make a point, he just sees people and decides to kill them. Brad Miska’s article The Boogeyman, Fear, and Responsibility – A Close Analysis of ‘Halloween’ (1978)  suggests that Michael is killing characters who “(throw) off their responsibilities in a way that reminds him of his first victim” – but he identifies his victims, stalking Laurie and her friends, long before he sees them shirking their babysitting duties, suggesting that he didn’t have a reason to kill these teenagers specifically. This reflected the serial killers of the era, who would kill people seemingly at random, often horrifically.

A running theme throughout Halloween is characters asking for help and being ignored. Sam Loomis desperately tries to convince anyone who will listen that Michael is armed, dangerous, and heading for Haddonfield to kill more people, but is constantly told he’s overreacting. Laurie tells her friends that a man in a mask is stalking her, and they laugh it off. Tommy Doyle, the boy Laurie babysits, sees Michael and tells Laurie that “the boogeyman” is watching him, only for her to dismiss it as childish fear. When Michael is chasing Laurie, she screams for help and bangs on a neighbour’s door, and the neighbour is seen looking out the window and consciously deciding to ignore her. These are all examples of a very real human behaviour: the tendency to ignore bad things, to sweep them under the rug and look in the other direction rather than getting involved. Not only could the events of Halloween happen to you, but nobody is going to help you, or even believe you, if they do.

Halloween also harkens back to themes present in some of the earliest horror stories that we still enjoy today. For instance, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein.

Like Halloween, Frankenstein has a villain who is quasi human, isolated from society, feared and rejected, and, eventually, a merciless killer with little to no empathy for his victims. Both stories make you wonder what it means to be human – and whether or not being human automatically means you have humanity. Both stories allow you to see from the perspective of the antagonist as well as the protagonist, although Halloween does this to create horror, and Frankenstein does it to raise questions of morality. In Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein abandons his creation and refuses to comply with his demands for a partner once he realizes the creature is capable of doing evil; in Halloween, Sam Loomis attempts to treat Michael for seven years, and then gives up, and focuses on keeping him contained instead. Both Loomis and Frankenstein dehumanize their respective charges, referring to them as “the creature”, or “it”, or “the demon”. Although the creature eventually learns to speak French, he has no formal education, and for the first part of his life he doesn’t know how to communicate at all, much like Michael, who has been silent, locked up, and heavily drugged since the age of six.

Of course, there are some pretty significant differences between the two stories as well. Frankenstein gives an immense amount of focus to why the creature does what he does; he speaks eloquently and attempts to reason with people, and although his actions are terrible, you sympathize with his situation and his feelings. Michael Myers is given no such motivation, and thus, no such empathy – his demeanour is cold, he is silent, and he wears a mask that makes him look more like a blank slate than a person. While much of the horror of Halloween comes from how real the events feel, Frankenstein is a work of science fiction, and although it may feel plausible to the reader, it’s not nearly as grounded in reality as Halloween. Halloween is also much more recent, so the fears – the people around you not being who they seem, injustices being swept under the rug to keep up the appearance of happiness and wholesomeness, bad things happening for no reason – are still pretty relevant today.

Halloween has its flaws, and it isn’t as scary, as novel, or as effective for a modern audience as it would have been when it was released, but it is altogether a good movie with an iconic legacy, and arguably the best slasher movie to date. That being said, it is a few days into November now, so we’ll give Halloween a rest (after all, the Black Christmas season is rapidly approaching).

Toodle-oo.