Get Out: Moral Monsters at the Intersection of Racism and the Horror Film

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.