The title of the new horror film Get Out alludes to a brilliant Eddie Murphy stand-up bit that is never mentioned in the movie—but a routine the African-American comedian Jordan Peele, who wrote and directed the movie, surely knows by heart. “I was watching movies like Poltergeist and Amityville Horror,” Murphy said on Saturday Night Live in 1982. “Why don’t the people just get the hell out of the house? You can’t make a horror movie with black people in it cause the movie’d stop.”
Then Murphy enacted a scene. A man has just moved into his new house and says to his wife, “Wow, baby, this is beautiful. We got a chandelier hanging up here, kids outside playing, it’s a beautiful neighborhood, I really love—this is beaut—”
Then Murphy’s voice changed to the disembodied voice from The Amityville Horror and growled: “Get out!” After which, Murphy straightened up, said, “Too bad we can’t stay,” and ran off.
Jordan Peele, best known as part of the two-man team responsible for the peerless Comedy Central series Key and Peele, set himself the challenge of solving the Eddie Murphy problem: How do you get a black guy to stay in a house from which he should certainly be fleeing long enough to get him into real trouble?
The answer: Have a young African-American photographer named Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) driven to the house for the weekend by his gorgeous and loving white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams), who is introducing him to her impeccably liberal parents (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener). She has neglected to tell them that he is black, and he finds their all-too-rapid acceptance of him creepy rather than warm. Leaving will poison his relations with them and probably end his relationship with her—and anyway, isn’t it the lot of men like Chris to suffer through discomfiting social experiences with either overly friendly or weirdly hostile white people?
Chris’s weekend keeps getting stranger as the white people around him seem to be playacting, while the black people who work at the house have a robotic quality that vanishes every now and then under stress when their eyes suddenly brim with unnerving tears. Rose’s mother, a hypnotherapist, puts Chris under to get him to quit smoking but mostly asks disturbing questions about the death of Chris’s mother.
A gang of senior citizens shows up for the annual garden party once thrown by Rose’s late grandparents—and the guests variously ask Chris to show them his golf swing, feel his muscles, and ask Rose if it’s true what they say about black men. The African-American husband of one of the guests, who is at least 30 years younger than she, is startled by a flash from Chris’s camera and suddenly sets upon Chris, screaming at him to get out.
The movie Get Out most resembles is Rosemary’s Baby, in which an unsure young woman finds herself living in an apartment building around a bunch of odd and false old people who take a wildly inappropriate interest in her burgeoning pregnancy. Peele, whose debut as a writer-director this is, learned a great deal about how to locate the bone-chilling shadows in otherwise perfectly normal settings from Roman Polanski’s superb 1968 adaptation of Ira Levin’s terse novel. We share Rosemary’s growing paranoia but don’t get what it is that she’s right to be afraid of until the big reveal in the last 10 minutes. The same is true in Get Out, which features a series of unguessable twists in its final half-hour.
The British actor Daniel Kaluuya’s quietly spectacular performance as Chris is a worthy successor to Mia Farrow’s classic turn in Rosemary’s Baby. But I don’t want to sell Peele’s accomplishment here short: Get Out is not only a killer thriller but an exquisite and macabre comedy of manners, and it’s original as all . . . get-out. It’s also on its way to grossing $200 million at the box office off a $4.5 million budget, which will make it one of the most successful movies in American history.
What Eddie Murphy didn’t understand was that if you can just figure out how to get the black guy to stay in the scary house, you can beat Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror at their own game.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
