Into the sunken place: nine years of ‘Get Out’

It is a vanishingly rare occurrence that a horror movie wins big at the Oscars. If anything, a horror nominee is likely to get more technical awards, like costumes, set design, cinematography or score — anything that doesn’t acknowledge the actual subject matter of the story. But sometimes, a story comes along that just can’t be denied. In 1992, it was “The Silence of the Lambs,” which (depending on how you categorize “Rebecca” and “The Shape of Water”) remains the only horror or horror-adjacent movie to win Best Picture.

At the 2026 ceremony, “Sinners” won four of its record-breaking 16 nominations. Before that, Jordan Peele received the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for “Get Out.”

Much has been said on the subject of “Get Out,” which also received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. The movie took Jordan Peele from a renowned comedian to pioneer of the contemporary horror genre. It ruthlessly exposed the dangers of racial violence, modern-day slavery and casual racism. It is viscerally horrifying, with hardly any violence until the end.

“Get Out” gives absolutely no quarter to those who believe that racism is a thing of the past. It shows, without a single shred of doubt, that racism is still very prevalent and just as dangerous as ever, especially when hidden behind a veneer of friendliness and support. Black film scholars have written more and better things about “Get Out” than me, and I recommend seeking out those words.

The opening scene of “Get Out” perfectly sets up the most terrifying aspect of the movie. A young Black man walks alone through a nice neighborhood and notices a car following him. He tries to shake it off, but is assaulted, shoved into the trunk and driven away into the night. From those first moments, “Get Out” makes it clear that the real terror here is not the Sunken Place or the near-supernatural brain surgery. It’s the danger that Black Americans face daily as they go about their lives. In fact, I would even go so far as to call “Get Out” one of the only true psychological horror movies.

If you think of a list of movies people call psychological horror, odds are they also overlap with another subgenre. “Hereditary,” for instance, is also very much a possession and witchcraft movie, with some cult thrown in there for good measure. “The Silence of the Lambs” is, effectively, a slasher, and you can quote me on that. Even psychological horror films with minimal gore still rely on some kind of supernatural element to make the horror work (see: “The Conjuring,” “The Ring,” etc.) and while there’s nothing wrong with that, it means that “psychological horror” is often a mislabel. Such is not the case with “Get Out.” There is nothing supernatural at play: no demons, no ghosts, no witches. Just people and their technology and their money that they can do whatever they want with. The scariest thing about “Get Out” is that if it could be real, it would be.

The Armitages seem fine, at first. Overly liberal, even. A discerning social media user once joked that if “Get Out” existed in the world of “Get Out,” the Armitages would’ve told Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) how much they loved “Get Out.” From their introduction, they act as though they are trying to get good grades in “meeting their white daughter’s Black boyfriend,” as turns out to basically be the case. The visit is normal, if a little interspersed with casual racism and microaggressions, until a dinner party with the Armitages’ friends reveals Andre, the young man we saw kidnapped at the beginning of the film. 

Upon approaching him, however, Chris realizes that whoever he’s talking to, it’s not Andre. The movie spirals from there, with Chris having unsettling encounter after unsettling encounter with the staff of the house, until he eventually finds a collection of pictures. In them, various Black people pose with his girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams) and some he recognizes as the staff. He tries to escape, but is knocked out and brought to the basement, where he is told that his body will now be used to house the brain of an aging white friend of the Armitages family, while his mind stays trapped in what they call the Sunken Place, always aware, but never able to act.

In terms of its literal positioning in the movie, the Sunken Place is deeply sinister, though not supernatural. The Armitages accomplish what they do — replacing the minds of young Black people with those of aging white people to give them a second lease on life in a “cool” body — through insane amounts of money and medical technology and that alone. The closest the film gets to the supernatural is accomplished through hypnosis performed by Missy Armitage (Catherine Keener). This is the real root of the horror of “Get Out,” and why I believe it to be one of the only true psychological horror movies.

There are people out there with the same beliefs as the Armitages. Many of them, in fact. Black people have been viewed as commodities for the whole of American history and that didn’t end after the Civil War. The Thirteenth Amendment didn’t actually abolish slavery, and American culture has never let go of its determination to treat Black people as disposable. As society changed and evolved, the meaning of that perspective changed with it, but the ideology that it was built on stayed the same — and that is what makes “Get Out” such a masterclass in horror: it can still get you once the movie’s over. It’s not Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees. It’s the real world that you and I live in, magnified to reveal every pore, every ugly bit, until you can’t look at it the same way again.

“Get Out” screens at the Fargo Theatre on Tuesday, October 6th, at 7 p.m. as part of the Centennial Film Series. Tickets are $7.