Get Out: The Complete Annotated Screenplay
Inventory Press, $19.95
The annotated script of —for which Jordan Peele won the first Oscar awarded to an African American for an original screenplay—opens with Tananarive Due’s incisive essay “ and the Black Horror Aesthetic.” Due, a black horror creative, writes: “This country values blacks for everything except our actual blackness, our health and our lives. The Sunken Place is the system that suppresses us.” She quotes Peele, who explicates, “A big part of the Sunken Place, to me, is the silencing of our voice, the silencing of our screams.” Throughout his notes to this edition, Peele reasserts his desire to speak directly to a black audience and to acknowledge black horror devotees’ voices, even when on-screen characters appear to disregard their shouts to beware or to flee. Peele wants the African-American horror fan to feel represented—to believe that their presence is known, and that the film was created for them.
