Hello and Hallo-Welcome to our second #ThrowForwardThursday, where new horror gets the old Hallowfest treatment. You join your bloggers, Andy and Lilly, as they watch with growing horror as casual racism builds to a crescendo of race-based violence and mistreatment in the world, leading to pain, sadness, and untimely deaths–and after they finish with the evening news, they put on a film.
Today’s Film Offering: Get Out
Lilly: Sometimes you watch a horror film from a decade or two ago and you get this feeling that you’re missing something, you know? Like you had to have been there, had to have felt the environment in which the work was created, to really get the horror of it and to get what the filmmaker was trying to say.
Andy: What Lilly is trying to say is that Get Out has 2017 written all over it.
We watch a lot of horror here at Hallowfest (you don’t say) and there are a couple of movies that we have to let sit for a couple of days before we decide if we’re going to recommend them. That’s not to say they’re bad, but sometimes movies hide their lights (or we’re tired and slow that day) and it takes us a while to catch on.
Get Out is not one of those movies. It is one of those rare exceptions that is so obviously good, from the first few frames to the credits, that I’m going to say straight up here that we wholeheartedly recommend this one. If you want to stop reading the review right here and take it as a given, we’d be OK with that.
Still here? OK.
Lilly: Get Out is the story of young love. Well, it’s the story of young love being taken home to meet the parents. Well, it’s the story of young love being taken home to meet the parents when the daughter is white (Rose) and the boyfriend is black (Chris). Enter the Armitage family, by all accounts an open minded, liberal couple. Sure, they have a groundskeeper and a housekeeper who both happen to be black but that’s just because they used to work for their parents, and when they passed, they were practically part of the family and mumble mumble reasoning reasoning.
And if that isn’t awkward enough for you, the Armitage’s have a bit of a secret. They are batshit and just a bit evil. Surprise!
But they said they loved Obama! How could they?
To say anymore would be to spoil it, and this is one we really don’t want to do this with. It’s important you are surprised and pulled along with Chris as he gets to know the Armitage family–part of Get Out’s appeal is how it forces you past where empathy would naturally take you and into the position of doubting your imagination’s capabilities because you just keep getting gut punched.
Andy: It’s fantastic.
A side note, if I may be indulged. Some people may watch this and think that the politics is a little on the nose, especially in a Black Lives Matter era of America. Firstly, I would like to point you attention to our Night of the Living Dead review that we did earlier in the month, another film with explicit racial tensions from the middle of the civil rights era. Then I would like to direct your attention to literally any other horror movie. A movie can no more be apolitical than I can swim in a pool and not get wet, and horror movies are particularly susceptible to this due to reflecting many of the tensions and fears of the time in which they are made. Torture Porn, much derided, appeared in the aftermath of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Ronald Reagan’s Focus on the Family appeared at the same time that promiscuity in horror equalled death. Godzilla and Hiroshima are intimately linked. The list is endless and exhaustive.
So if you watch a movie like Get Out and feel challenged or uncomfortable, or feel it is overstepping its mark, it’s important to ask yourself why, instead of dismissing it as propaganda. Which is a shame anyway, because this, even stripped of any political context, is a cracking good movie. It’s witty, funny, tense and a joy to watch, but it is still a horror movie, through and through.
Lilly: A short review because we want you to experience it–but if you have any thoughts on it afterward, why not check out our facebook page, or find us on twitter (@hallowoctobfilm) and let us know what you think!
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