The Perfect Time For Horror

In Jordan Peele’s modern classic “Get Out” emotions and situations I’ve never seen depicted quite that way exploded onto the screen, and audiences went NUTS for it, earning a third of a BILLION dollars on a budget of about eight million. The interesting thing is that, while Peele made the movie specifically for black audiences, as it touched his own personal issues deeply, both black AND white. But they seemed to extract different lessons.

Black people: Is there NO ONE white I can trust? Even if we supposedly love each other? Even if they are “Liberal allies”?

White People: Has there been so much damage between black and white that we cannot even communicate? Cannot find a place of trust?

There are, of course, other thematic threads: there always are in the world of a sophisticated artist. The commoditization of black bodies. White envy of black physicality. The danger of “swirling”: interracial romance.

And on and on. Every single one of these questions is valid, powerful, and painful. And they had never been expressed onscreen as “Get Out” did, in the context of a “horror movie” that exaggerated and personified issues that have boiled beneath the surface of American race relations for centuries.

What are we, as human beings? What is the real nature of the world?

This is art. And when you tell a story that pivots on the emotion of fear, it is horror. And if those emotions are generated by accessing the twisted, tortured racial history…