Get Out

Jordan Peele’s Get Out is not merely a horror film but a cinematic dissection of racial alienation, one that resonates profoundly with the writings of Frantz Fanon. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon illuminates the psychic violence inflicted upon Black bodies through the smiling masks of colonial civility. Peele translates this violence into the grammar of horror, a genre that often reveals the grotesque truths lurking beneath everyday life.

At its core, Get Out portrays the paradox of liberal white spaces: warm hospitality cloaked in benevolent language, yet beneath the surface, the Black body is still rendered an object to be possessed, exploited, and commodified. The Armitage family’s obsession with Blackness—its physicality, vitality, and cultural aura—reflects what Fanon described as the colonizer’s simultaneous desire for and fear of the colonized subject. This desire, masked as admiration, is revealed in Peele’s narrative to be a violent extraction, a surgical theft of identity itself.

Chris, the film’s protagonist, becomes the archetypal figure of the racialized subject navigating a world where his humanity is perpetually questioned. His polite deflections and cautious smiles mirror Fanon’s analysis of the “epidermal racial schema”—the imposed awareness that one is always viewed through the lens of race, even in moments of supposed intimacy. The “sunken place” that Chris is forced into is the perfect cinematic metaphor for the colonized psyche: conscious yet silenced, aware yet unable to assert agency. It is an internal exile, a place where the subject witnesses their erasure without power to resist.

The genius of Get Out lies in its ability to transform psychological theory into visceral terror. The audience does not merely watch Chris’s alienation—they feel it, through the tightening grip of social awkwardness, microaggressions, and the uncanny politeness that edges into menace. Peele refuses to allow horror to remain escapist; instead, he insists that America’s racial history itself is the horror, its violence embedded in rituals of politeness, in the desire to consume the Black body under the guise of admiration.

Yet the film is not merely diagnostic; it is also insurgent. Chris’s eventual rebellion against the Armitages is a symbolic act of decolonization, a reclamation of agency against a system that would literally occupy his flesh. In this sense, Peele channels Fanon’s revolutionary spirit, suggesting that liberation comes not from accommodation but from confrontation, even destruction of the structures that sustain racial domination.

Get Out stands as a cinematic exorcism of America’s racial unconscious, a reminder that beneath the veneer of progress lies a history of possession and control. By staging horror within the very spaces deemed “safe” and “civil,” Peele unveils what Fanon understood with clarity: that the colonizer’s smile often hides the deepest violence, and that freedom requires both recognition of this truth and the courage to resist it.