Much has already been said about the connections between George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1960) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). Critics have so far, however, missed a vitally important thread between the two: they’re both zombie films.
Jordan Peele is pretty open about the connections between these two films. In an interview with the New York Times, he describes Night of the Living Dead as one of the major inspirations for Get Out, and traces a number of links between Night of the Living Dead’s protagonist, Ben (Duane Jones), and Get Out’s Chris (Daniel Kaluuya).
Ben (Duane Jones) in Night of the Living Dead Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) in Get Out
Early in their respective films, both Ben and Chris find themselves to be the lone black man in a house full of white people. Ben, who quickly takes control of the situation and proves himself to be extremely resourceful, is never overtly the subject of racist attacks or accusations. His presence does, though, add a palpable layer of racial tension throughout Night of the Living Dead.[i] According to Peele:
“All social norms break down when this event happens and a black man is caged up in a house with a white woman who is terrified. But you’re not sure how much she’s terrified at the monsters on the outside or this man on the inside who is now the hero. Also, the end of the movie, that’s nothing if it’s a white dude.”
Ben and Barbra (Judith O’Dea) in Night of the Living Dead
In Get Out, Jordan Peele flips the racial fears present in Night of the Living Dead partly by aligning the audience with Chris. As the film slowly reveals that all is not right in the seemingly idyllic Armitage household, we hope that Chris gets out of this threatening all-white environment. The ending emphasizes the danger of being black in a white setting by merely suggesting a situation with which current American audiences are unfortunately too familiar. As what appears to be a police car pulls into the Armitage driveway, it appears that Chris will become yet another innocent black victim, the presumed murderer rather than the heroic survivor.
Chris puts his hands up as a police car arrives at the end of the film
By reading Get Out as part of the great American zombie tradition, Peele’s film is suddenly revealed to be even more subversive than initially meets the eye. First, Peele gives the American zombie film a fresh reboot by bringing the zombie back to its African roots. The original zombie is deeply tied to colonialism and anxieties surrounding slavery. Haitian folklore tells stories of witch doctors, or bokors, possessing the ability to zombify their enemies. This process includes the bokor capturing the victim’s soul in a jar and reanimating the now zombified corpse to perform labor in service of the bokor.[ii]
During the production of Night of the Living Dead, Romero needed to American-ize the Haitian zombie. To do that, he made two prominent alterations: Romero’s zombies were threatening and not culpable. The Haitian zombie was not something to be feared; rather the process of zombification was the true source of dread. While the American zombie hungers for human flesh, the Haitian zombie has no desires and exists solely as a drone to serve its bokor master without any sort of free will. Additionally, Romero changed the zombie’s culpability. According to Haitian folklore, you would only be zombified if you did something to upset the bokor. In Night of the Living Dead (and in practically every American zombie film following Romero’s example), zombification occurs through a chaotic epidemic that destroys civilization and claims its victims at random.
A zombie horde approaches in Night of the Living Dead
In Get Out, we see a return (though not exact) to the original conception of the zombie. Of course, because American audiences are more familiar with the Romero zombie, it’s difficult to notice Peele’s fresh addition to the zombie sub-genre. By placing the souls of their black victims into “the sunken place” and using their victims’ bodies as vehicles for white brains to control, the Armitage family behaves as a new sort of bokor. While the original Haitian belief states that the bokor’s victim becomes zombified because they offended the bokor in some way, Peele’s zombies are selected because of their varied physical talents: Chris is chosen because of his “eye” for photography, while the Armitage grandfather chose Walter (Marcus Henderson) because of his physical strength. The culpability of Peele’s zombified characters therefore lies somewhere in between the guilt of the Haitian zombie and the innocence of the Americanized zombie.
Chris falls into the Sunken Place
The focus on the physicality of black bodies in determining their fate as zombie places Get Out still closer to the original zombie tale, which found its strength in its mobilization of Haitian fears of colonialism and the trauma of slavery. Get Out famously even features a silent auction scene that directly connects to the 19th century American practice of slave auctions. One of Peele’s goals in writing and directing this film was to make visible the “post-racial lie” of present-day America. According to Peele, Get Out was at least partly inspired by “knowing racism is still very much alive in this country, but that it was sort of being neglected as an issue.”
Monster fiction is a common mode used to make otherwise normalized monstrosity visible to mass audiences.[iii] In creating Get Out, Peele works within this genre; however, he also makes the genre itself difficult for American audiences to decipher. The presence of zombification in Get Out mimics the form of racism that Peele is interested in displaying (namely, white liberal racism), in that both are difficult to discern, discuss, and explain to those who are not exposed to its dangers. In viewing Get Out for what it is- a zombie film- its depiction of the return of the repressed becomes more visible: slavery, colonialism, and racism are exposed as America’s living dead, still walking amongst us.
NOTES
[i] For a more sustained examination of the social dynamics in Night of the Living Dead, check out Elizabeth’s post, “Social Commentary Via Zombie.”
[ii] For more information about the Haitian zombie and Romero’s creation of the American zombie, check out the excellent Faculty of Horror podcast episode that covers all things Romero: “Undead Walking: Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), and Day of the Dead (1985).”
[iii] McNally, David. Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2011.
Caitlin Duffy is a Ph.D. student in English literature at Stony Brook University. Her research interests include 19th century gothic literature, American horror films, biopolitics, and the ecogothic. While working through her doctoral studies, Caitlin maintains a blog. You can also follow her on Twitter.
