Savannah’s Weekend Movie

This weekend’s “Top 50 Horror Movies Scratch Off Movie Night Ideas!” comes from Jordan Peele, and it’s oddly appropriate.

Savannah, reporting in with my bowl of garlic parmesan popcorn, for this week’s Top 50 Horror Movie surprise. Created by Palettes & Prints, it is a deck of fifty scratch-off cards, each containing one of the top horror movies from the 50’s all the way to 2023 when the deck was created. Tonight’s film had the following clues on the card:

R, 2017, 104 minutes

Psychological, Thriller, Mystery, and Comedy

That’s right! It’s a modern classic, Get Out, from none other than Jordan Peele. Now, I’ve never seen this movie before, so Adam and I got our blankets and our snacks and prepared to be terrorized.

Get Out starts with what feels like a random scene, a black man walking the street at night. But when a car pulls around and follows him, he knows something isn’t right. When he is inevitably attacked, instead of following him, the movie cuts away instead to a brightly lit apartment where we meet our main character—Chris Washington, played by the insanely talented Daniel Kaluuya.

Chris is a talented photographer in a mixed-race relationship. His girlfriend, Rose, makes it a point to harp on the fact that she hasn’t dated a black man before. Together, they embark on a weekend jaunt for Chris’s first meeting with her family.

As if meeting the parents isn’t nerve wracking enough, Chris feels singled out. Is it his race, or something else? Maybe it’s the fact that his girlfriend’s parents are a neurosurgeon and a psychiatrist? Either way, they do nothing to dispel his unease, which is only heightened by the odd behavior of the family’s servants.

Get Out delves deep into racism, twisting the lens not on the usual suspects like Nazis or the “bless your little heart” Southerners, but instead on what appears to be middle-class liberals. Peele did a great job showcasing this “otherness”, and making viewers uncomfortable. It also calls into question things like “missing white girl syndrome”—where white women and girls are more likely to be given priority in news than other races and genders.

The use of past trauma as a foreshadowing for what would unfold in the end was a stroke of genius. Honestly, I thought this was going to go in a completely different direction. My reviews will always be spoiler free, but this is one time I was happy to be wrong. I also enjoyed that the movie made no attempt to have viewers sympathize with the villains, but instead painted them starkly as they were—pure, selfish, enduring evil.

The sad thing about this movie is the plausibility, in a sense. Not so much the science, but the racial tones, and how overlooked certain patterns were that could have prevented the whole damn thing. Get Out is a film that stays with you long after the credits roll and the popcorn bowl is empty. 5/5, I 100% agree with this being in the top 50 horror movies. Hell, it might simply be one of the BEST movies in general.

Savannah R. Fischer is the permanently exhausted pigeon in charge of two well-loved chaos gremlins. When not with her family, she can usually be found in her cave, wrapped in an oversized blanket and dreaming of spinach puffs. She wants to show her gremlins that they can do hard things, even when it’s scary, like pulling the wrong lever and ending up in a pit of alligators. No llamas were harmed in the making of her works of horror.