Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror

edited by Dawn Keetley

Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror, edited by Dawn Keetley (Ohio State University Press, 2020).

Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror is a collection of fourteen scholarly essays (including the introduction) devoted to exploring Get Out’s roots in the horror tradition and its complex and timely commentary on 21st-century US race relations. The first section traces the influence of the gothic and horror tradition on Peele’s film, from Shakespeare’s Othello, through the female Gothic and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, to the modern horror film, including the zombie, rural, suburban, and body-swap subgenres of horror.  The second section takes up Get Out’s varied political interventions—notably its portrayal of the continuation of slavery and the deformation of the black body and mind in white “progressive” America.