Jordan Peele Understood the Assignment: Turning the Audience into The Monster
By Ellie Sivins
In Danse Macabre, Stephen King wrote about how horror “will… find the secret door to the room you believed no one but you knew of.” Sometimes that secret door is unlocked through jump scares and monsters hiding in the dark. Other times, these classic elements of horror do not satisfy our fears. Over time audiences have become so desensitized to ghosts, demons, and slashers that horror has to evolve beyond nightmares, and into the world of the living.
During an interview, Jordan Peele spoke about how “no one wants to look at their faults,” and in his two major blockbusters Get Out and Us, he forces us to do exactly that. Peele utilizes classic elements of horror in jump scares, high-pitched scores, submerging scenes in darkness, and harnessing the grotesque, but these elements do not carry the narrative as in many other horrors. Instead, in Get Out and Us, the focus of the horror is how the audience can be the monster, and when the monster is the audience, all the movie has to do is hold up the mirror.
Get Out follows Chris, a black man who visits his white girlfriend’s family on their upper-crust estate. When they arrive, everything appears to be normal, until Chris discovers the family has been kidnapping black people for years, taking their bodies, and storing their dead relatives inside. Peele presents the narrative of white people using black bodies for their own progression in life, a direct reflection of how old wealth throughout the world was regularly funded by slavery. Further, the white family is erasing black people with their own selves. This erasure is prevalent throughout history where white people reap the benefits of black culture while imposing their own opinions on these communities and effectively silencing them.
While the connection to slavery and the abuse of power of the white family is barbaric and almost seems pre-historic, Peele forces the audiences to consider the extent of racism that is still prevalent today. A prime example of this is in the ending when a police car shows up at the scene with Chris standing over Rose’s dead body — you can’t help but hold your breath. Although we know Chris is the victim, that doesn’t mean the police will too, an unfortunate reality across America. Luckily in the car, his friend Rod is there to help. However, the initial tension of the scene juxtaposes how white protagonists in the genre are unconditionally helped after murdering their attacker whereas a black protagonist has to prove himself the victim.
The narrative is a stark reminder to audiences that, although they may not see or experience racism every day, it is still happening. If we choose to ignore the problem, as though it has nothing to do with us, somewhere tucked away on an upper-crust estate, audiences align themselves with the monsters. For white audiences, the family of monsters can be construed as a reflection of their own ancestral injustices, and the horrific ramifications of the past. However, Get Out is set in modern day, and what is most horrific for audiences is that these monsters do not only exist in the past. Monsters of the past breed monsters in the present and insidious acts of abuse and racism are still exacted toward black people across the world today.
In Peele’s second feature, Us, he again focuses on this concept of otherness, but in a much different way than Get Out. When doppelgangers of a family show up to kill them, audiences are tasked with determining who’s the monster. The picturesque, suburban middle-class family or the silent, haunting other?
At the beginning of the movie, audiences are offered a scene to be jealous of: a vacation home, a car, a boat, and countless other things not many of us can afford. In the first half of the movie, the only conversations the father has with his family are about material things he needs and wants. The family’s wealth becomes one of the only major disparities between them and their ‘shadow selves.’ Without the same privileges of wealth, the shadow selves are silenced, forced to give birth in horrific ways, and driven to crime. It is a disparity around the world, and yet, similar to the protagonists, so easy to ignore when we are the ones in the privileged seat.
The narrative encourages audiences to consider how the privileged have had a tendency of viewing those with less as subhuman when it is the people that place more value on their belongings than other humans who are the monsters. Which, when considering how capitalist-driven western society has become, can be a tough pill to swallow. Further, the doppelgangers are empty, soulless versions of the protagonists, and the narrative confronts the idea that the non-shadow selves may be empty too. This is doubly confirmed when the ending reveals that the audience could not tell the difference between the shadow self and the human. Continuing the capitalist vein through the movie, viewing all the people involved as ‘empty,’ presents this idea that filling our lives with things does not make a person whole.
Peele contrasts the jealousy at the beginning of the movie with how this need for wanting more is actually a monstrous construct. It is not necessarily labeling the individual as the monster but wider society itself. This emptiness inside us is fed on by the monsters of capitalism, and the more we allow them to feed on us, the more we perpetuate this cycle of materialistic greed to make us whole. Those who do not have excess belongings become the ‘other,’ and Us are the monsters for accusing them as such.
In Peele’s works, horror is used to address social issues without resorting to scapegoating monsters; rather, he places the blame on us. We leave his movies with a fear of what we could become, and what we may already be. By examining the inner workings of a person and evaluating how, at the core, we could all be the monsters, Peele’s movies dramatically differ from 80s slashers and countless Stephen King remakes. Get Out and Us terrify us because, in them, we discover the monster in the dark might actually be ourselves. This evolution shows how horror can become fear for thought in our day-to-day actions instead of a new costume for Halloween. 🩸
About
Ellie Sivins is a horror writer who is ironically scared of everything. She has bylines in Grim Magazine, The Ascent, and The Writing Co-operative. More of her work can be found at @ellieiswriting.
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