Get Out: The Complete Annotated Screenplay

By Jordan Peele and Tananarive Due

Jordan Peele’s celebrated screenplay combines horror and dark humor to reveal the terrifying realities of being Black in America

"Blending race-savvy satire with horror to especially potent effect, this bombshell social critique from first-time director Jordan Peele proves positively fearless."
–Peter Debruge, Variety

"An exhilaratingly smart and scary freak out about a black man in a white nightmare."
–Manohla Dargis, New York Times

"A major achievement, a work that deserves, in its own way, to be viewed alongside Barry Jenkins' Moonlight as a giant leap forward for the possibilities of black cinema; Get Out feels like it would have been impossible five minutes ago."
–Brandon Harris, New Yorker

A New York Times 2019 holiday gift guide pick

Jordan Peele’s powerful thriller Get Out debuted in 2017 to enormous public and critical acclaim, a Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? for the age of Obama and Trump that scared audiences and skewered white liberal pieties at the same time. Rather than rely on popular archetypes, Peele weaves together the material realities and daily manifestations of horror with sociopolitical fears and elements of true suspense, and combines them with pitch-perfect satire and a timely cultural critique. This companion paperback to the film presents Peele’s Oscar-winning screenplay alongside supplementary material.

Featuring an essay by author and scholar Tananarive Due and in-depth annotations by the director, this publication is richly illustrated with more than 150 stills from the motion picture and presents alternate endings, deleted scenes and an inside look at the concepts and behind-the-scenes production of the film. Continuing in the legacy of 1960s paperbacks that documented the era’s most significant avant-garde films—such as Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin/Feminin and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura—Get Out is an indispensable guide to this pioneering and groundbreaking cinematic work.

Jordan Peele (born 1979) is an American writer, director and producer. Peele’s directorial debut, Get Out (2017), earned him an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay as well as nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. In 2012, Peele founded Monkeypaw Productions, which amplifies traditionally underrepresented voices and unpacks contemporary social issues, while cultivating artistic, thought-provoking projects across film, television and digital platforms, including Peele’s follow-up to Get Out, the critically acclaimed horror epic, Us (2019).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inventory Press
• Release date: Feb 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9781941753736

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Get Out and the Black Horror Aesthetic

Tananarive Due

CHRIS

Do they know I’m Black?

In 2006, I pitched a film adaptation of one of my books with my collaborator and husband, Steven Barnes, our producers, and the proposed director, Oscar winning actor Forest Whitaker. The novel is about a Black family fighting intergenerational racism—and a demon. After our pitch, the movie executive raved about the premise and the characters. Then he said, I have to ask … do the characters have to be Black?

Whitaker replied with a firm Yes, and we all felt good about holding our ground. But, no movie. More than ten years before that, an executive from a studio that optioned another of my novels also admitted that they had wrestled with the question of Black leads—in a story about an immortal Ethiopian who survived slavery in the U.S.

This is largely what the Hollywood experience has been for Black horror creatives. Until now.

And that is why, in the fall of 2016, I sat, mouth agape, watching the trailer for an upcoming horror film called Get Out. It had a Black protagonist, was addressing race in ways both obvious and subtle, and it showed a Black child sink through his bed and the floor into what I would later learn was a quietly revolutionary concept called the Sunken Place.

I didn’t know at the time that I was watching Black horror history in the making. Indeed, film history in the making (Jordan Peele was the first African American to win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay). From its opening shot of Andre (LaKeith Stanfield) lost in nervous isolation in a white suburb, the film exceeded the promise of its trailer with its adept depiction of Black people’s fears, race relations, false allies, the coveting and appropriation of Black bodies, the legacy of slavery, racial microaggressions, and the Sunken Place’s metaphor for subjugation at the dawn of the Trump era.

Just as Duane Jones’ Ben, facing off against shambling white ghouls in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead represented the cultural and civil rights revolutions of the 1960s, William Crain’s Blacula retooled the vampire trope with a yearning for African heritage and Black empowerment in the 1970s, and Rusty Cundieff’s tales of magical retribution in Tales from the Hood gave moviegoers on-screen justice after the L.A.P.D. beating of Rodney King in the 1990s, Get Out is fueled not just by Chris’ story on the surface, but by the deeper, and much older, story underneath. Black history is Black horror. A genre that enables viewers to reframe true-life trauma on the screen as imaginary monsters and demons is tailor-made for the Black American experience.

The Black Horror Audience

ROD

Bruh, how are you not scared of this, man?

So why do Black people love horror so much? As Get Out shows us explicitly, horror is an excellent mechanism to visualize, confront, and try to overcome racial trauma. I inherited my own love for the genre from my late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due. She wore dark glasses for the rest of her life after a Tallahassee, Florida, police officer threw a teargas cannister in her face during a peaceful protest march in 1960. The Universal Pictures horror classics she raised me on, like Dracula and The Fly, often had no Black characters at all. I believe my mother’s attraction to horror was driven by the same reasons Get Out was so effective as an artistic vehicle for conveying racial trauma—because we’re a minority surrounded by whiteness, which often proves to be hostile or fearful, horror can serve as a coping mechanism by helping us visualize allegorical monsters, as well as offering release and lessons on survival and rebellion against seemingly overwhelming forces.

One movie I watched with my mother as a child was The Mole People (1956), about researchers who discover an underground world when dark, monstrous mole-like people pull them down into the soil. Although I was originally frightened by them—as intended—when I saw their human overseers whipping and mistreating them, I grasped—even as a child—the slavery metaphor, so I rejoiced when they rebelled. In watching horror, my mother and I sometimes empathized with the white actors fighting off the monsters, and sometimes we empathized with the monsters that were shunned and hunted by society. Either way, watching scary movies was my mother’s way of escaping the horrors of racism, and she passed that love on to me.

The key to the power of Get Out lies in both Peele’s intention on the screen and the needs of the Black horror audience it was created to serve. As Peele has said, "I made Get Out for everybody in the audience. I didn’t want anybody to see it and not get it. But I really made it for Black audiences. If Black audiences didn’t get it, didn’t like it, that’s a fail."¹ In addition to telling the story of Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), whose weekend with the family of his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) devolves into a nightmare of racialized abduction and sci fi body snatching, Get Out redresses decades of erasure, abuse, clichés, and damaging tropes that have stained horror cinema, Hollywood, and American history.

Many Black moviegoers love horror and have for generations. Horror gives Black movie audiences an opportunity to experience danger without a true cost, releasing tension and creating community against imaginary monsters while we groan at protagonists who walk toward the danger instead of running away from it. As Richard Pryor said in his classic 1974 routine about The Exorcist, if Black people had been in that cast, The movie would have been about seven minutes long, as soon as the devil spoke: ‘Helloooooooo.’ GOODBYE.² As Peele has said, I think that often it’s a stereotype, but a true stereotype, the idea of the Black horror fans being very vocal about how dumb the lead character is being. I think this comes from frustration of lack of representation, not just of our skin, but our sensibility.³

Instead of rewarding our love for the genre, too often horror films either have erased us or shown us only contempt. From the monstrous blackfaced Gus in The Birth of a Nation to Scatman Crothers’ wasted sacrifice in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to the white-woman-obsessed Candyman, horror often has fallen far short of its potential for meaningful portrayals of Black people. Lack of representation in film—horror being no exception—is a hostile act of erasure.

The particular genius of Get Out is the way in which it serves as both a reflection of African Americans’ most enduring fears and traumas, and holds a mirror to the face of white society, particularly white liberals, who can identify their own problematic attitudes and behaviors, such as cough-like reflexes conjuring references to Barack Obama or Tiger Woods in response to meeting someone with Black skin. Or their infatuation with Black slang and culture to mask discomfort and racism, foster false rapport, or minimize their privilege.

And the premise of Get Out bridges Black and white audiences through the introduction of Chris and Rose’s interracial relationship—the most explosive pairing in the fault line of U.S. racial history.

Get Out and White Women

DETECTIVE LATOYA

(to her colleagues)

… White girls’ll get you every time!

Nearly a hundred years before Get Out, social justice advocate, essayist and NAACP co-founder W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about an interracial couple in his post-apocalyptic sci fi/horror story The Comet, in which the only two survivors after a comet hits New York City are a Black man and white woman. Published in 1920, The Comet is a literary response to the U.S. lynching crisis (during which Black men often were lynched after false accusations of rape of white women). As the only two known survivors, Jim and Julia inherit a world where racial barriers have been destroyed. But as soon as they begin to ponder a possible future, Julia’s father and a crowd of whites find them, and an outcry goes up to lynch Jim. Julia explains that Jim saved her, but she quickly turns her eyes away from him to vanish back into whiteness. Only the true end of the world might have brought them together.

Racist whites have long held a special fear of Black men raping and socializing with white women: it’s projection. United States history is partially built on the systemic rape of enslaved Black women. Black women also had no legal recourse for generations; no Black woman in the South won a rape case against white men until Betty Jean Owens in 1959.⁴ This fear of payback is the emotional impetus driving D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), where the Ku Klux Klan must rise to protect white women’s virtue. Whether it was fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955, the Rosewood Massacre in 1923, the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, or the Exonerated Five (depicted in Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us) in 1989, the accusation of rape or sexual advances is the defining racist narrative about Black men and white women. It’s the unspoken anxiety at the start of Night of the Living Dead (1968), when a white woman finds herself trapped in a house with a Black man. Racists must have been gasping before the ghouls showed up at the door.

So often in film, especially in historical horror, Black men are monstrous. But not in Get Out. Instead, it’s the white characters—particularly white women—who are the monsters.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), which starred Sidney Poitier as a genteel Black doctor engaged to a young white socialite, is a primary cinematic forebear to the interracial imagery in Get Out. Katharine Hepburn’s near-fainting episode in the earlier film echoes Dean’s reflexive use of my man when facing his daughter’s Black boyfriend in Get Out. Chris, like Poitier’s Dr. Prentice, is a well-mannered and successful racial ambassador to a white family. Chris inspires empathy because he’s just so danged nice, coupled with his tragic backstory as a motherless child. But instead of the wink-wink playfulness in the title of Poitier’s film, Get Out promises a far more troubling visit.

In Get Out, Chris and Rose—and race—are at the center of a story taking place during the wilier, 2017–style era of racism. In Peele’s America, the lynch mobs wear police