Abstract
Pinedo uses critical race theory to analyze how Get Out (2017) simultaneously engages and subverts horror film tropes to depict the disposability of black life in post-racial America, in the process, extending Clover’s figure of the Final Girl beyond its original theoretical and empirical limitations. The film’s central image is the ‘sunken place,’ a form of social death depicted as a void within which black subjectivity is constricted and isolated while a white person controls his/her fate. This chapter explores how the film and promotional strategies construct both black subjectivity and the moral monsters that would systematically degrade a class of human beings without remorse. It shows that racial politics in Get Out falls on the critical cross line between Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the Black Lives Matter movement.
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Notes
- 1.
Daniel Kaluuya was 26.
- 2.
Torture porn refers to a horror film cycle of the mid to late-2000s characterized by low budgets, extensive and graphic depictions of torture, and the aforementioned narrative trajectory. See Pinedo (2014) for a fuller discussion.
- 3.
Again, as with other patterns, this is not always true if we think about films such as Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985, United States, dir. Danny Steinmann) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987, United States, dir. Chuck Russell).
- 4.
See Palmer (2017) for an incisive analysis of race and gender in torture porn film Undocumented (2010, United States, Chris Peckover).
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Filmography
28 Days Later (2002, UK, dir. Danny Boyle).
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, United States, dir. Wes Craven).
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987, United States, dir. Chuck Russell).
Friday the 13th (1980, United States, dir. Sean S. Cunningham).
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985, United States, dir. Danny Steinmann).
Get Out (2017, United States, dir. Jordan Peele).
Halloween (1978, United States, dir. John Carpenter).
Hereditary (2018, United States, dir. Ari Aster).
Hostel (2004, United States/Czech Republic, dir. Eli Roth).
Hostel: Part II (2007, United States, dir. Eli Roth).
I Am Not Your Negro (2016, France/United States/Switzerland/Belgium, dir. Raoul Peck).
Mississippi Burning (1988, United States, dir. Alan Parker).
Night of the Living Dead (1968, United States, dir. George A. Romero).
Prom Night (1980, Canada, Paul Lynch).
Rosemary’s Baby (1968, United States, dir. Roman Polański).
Skeleton Key (2005, United States, dir. Iain Softley).
Slumber Party Massacre (1982, United States, Amy Holden Jones).
The Believers (1987, United States, dir. John Schlesinger).
The Blind Side (2009, United States, dir. John Lee Hancock).
The Help (2011, United States/India/United Arab Emirates, dir. Tate Taylor).
The Stepford Wives (1975, United States, dir. Bryan Forbes).
Undocumented (2010, United States, Chris Peckover).
Acknowledgments
Heather Levi, Katarzyna Paszkiewicz and Stacy Rusnak generously provided valuable feedback on various versions of this chapter. Chorouk Akik supplied much appreciated research assistance. Thanks to my Fall 2018 Horror Film students for animated discussions of earlier versions of some of these ideas. This project was supported in part by an award from the Hunter College President’s Fund for Faculty Advancement.
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Pinedo, I. (2020). Get Out: Moral Monsters at the Intersection of Racism and the Horror Film. In: Paszkiewicz, K., Rusnak, S. (eds) Final Girls, Feminism and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31523-8_5
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