Abstract
Dawn Keetley’s edited collection makes a very timely read at a time when unequal treatment and discrimination of African Americans in the United States are yet again a key topic for public debate prompted by the death of George Floyd and the subsequent wave of protests. The book is about a horror film – Get Out – released in 2017, which according to Keetley is ‘Both a horror film about race and a parable about contemporary racial relations told through horror tropes’ (p. 2). The main character is an African American man who visits his white girlfriend’s parents’ home in New York where the horror action unfolds: Knocked unconscious, Chris wakes up in the family’s basement strapped to a chair and watching a video that tells him he will be undergoing an operation, the Coagula procedure, that will transplant a white man’s brain into his head, divesting him of almost all consciousness and rendering him a mere passenger in his own body. (p. 2)
Keetley reminds the reader of the commercial success of the film and the fact that it was nominated for four Academy Awards, and also that ‘Get Out has been at the center of a storm of controversy over genre’ (p. 2). Jordan Peele himself defined the film as a social thriller because in his view society and humans in particular are ‘the best and scariest monsters in the world’ (p. 2). The film is about race indeed and the book itself understandably revolves around this issue. It is divided into two main parts: ‘The Politics of Horror’ and ‘The Horror of Politics’. As the editor explains, ‘the first section considers Peele’s film within the horror tradition, exploring how Get Out employs the conventions of both gothic and horror to shape its (political) meanings’ (pp. 14–15). It consists of eight chapters exploring the links between Get Out and Othello; the Female Gothic tradition; the black horror movie tradition and the ‘whitopia’ notion; the zombie film White Zombie; the suburban and the rural horror film; the ‘body swap’ film, and Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, while the final chapter in this first part argues that ‘contemporary gothic functions as systemic critique, specifically a critique of neoliberal capitalism as it shapes racialized hierarchy and inequality’ (p. 16). Part II then ‘takes up the politics of Get Out more directly, exploring the film’s sustained critique of racist institutions and practices. Peele’s progenitors in this section are traced to the real world rather than the literary and filmic traditions’ (p. 16). It consists of eight chapters looking into a range of issues, such as the racial divide in early reviews of the movie; ‘Get Out as a film about slave revolt’; how the film ‘articulates specific racial identity formations’, including double consciousness and the colonisation of the black body (p. 16). As a whole, Keetley’s edited collection achieves its main purpose – to continue the conversations about the gothic and horror traditions and the politics of race that the film started.