The Horror of 'Get Out' Is Everywhere

Complicit in the new critically acclaimed horror film Get Out is an understanding that Americans’ nerves are still pretty raw from back-to-back-to-back summers of high-profile police killings of black people. Our expectation is that when a black man gets entangled with a police officer, there will be a bad outcome. Between black and white people, we won’t agree on who the victim will be in such encounters, but we will agree that the result will likely be off-putting. This agreement is used as a tension-boiler throughout the film, but not in a Heat of the Night, or Glass Shield kind of way. In the age of Facebook Live, we don’t need more dramatizations of how this usually plays out.

In one of Get Out’s early scenes, a police officer interacts with Chris (Daniel Kaluuya of “Black Mirror”) and his girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams, from “Girls”), who are stranded on a woody road in the middle of nowhere. The couple hit a deer while driving to Rose’s parents’ house and now blood is splattered all over their car’s headlights. Before the cop arrives, Chris stands over the deer, glaring deeply into its eyes as it whimpers dying breaths. Soon after, Chris sits on the car’s hood while his girlfriend sparks an argument with the patrolman called to the scene. The cop asks for Chris’s license even though he wasn’t driving, and you immediately sense danger: Chris is passengering-and-dating-white-while-black in an area that looks like a place where black men were noosed up on oak for a whole lot less.