Jordan Peele's Get Out

<i>Jordan Peele’s </i>Get Out<i>: Political Horror</i> is a collection of sixteen essays devoted to exploring <i>Get Out</i>’s roots in the horror tradition and its complex and timely commentary on twenty-first-century US race relations. The first section, “The Politics of Horror,” traces the influence of the gothic and horror tradition on Peele’s film, from Shakespeare’s <i>Othello</i>, through the female gothic and Ira Levin’s <i>Rosemary’s Baby</i> and <i>The Stepford Wives</i>, to the modern horror film, including the zombie, rural, suburban, and body-swap subgenres of horror. The second section, “The Horror of Politics,” takes up <i>Get Out</i>’s varied political interventions—notably its portrayal of the continuation of slavery and the deformation of the black body and mind in white, so-called progressive America. Contributors address Peele’s film alongside African American figures such as Nat Turner, W. E. B. Du Bois, and James Baldwin. Taken together, the essays illuminate how <i>Get Out</i> stands as both a groundbreaking intervention in the horror tradition as well as a devastating unmasking of racism in the contemporary United States.