Get Out isn’t just a movie, it’s a uniquely celebrated, distinctive experience. It’s one of those rare movies that becomes a cultural talking point, an exciting and insightful commentary about our times. It’s also a fantastically entertaining horror movie, so it became that movie you absolutely HAD to see. If you missed Get Out in theaters, you can finally now watch it on DVD and Blu-ray, but even if you did see the movie in its initial run the home video release is worth watching. First, you get to own a brilliant film, but second, the disc is loaded with excellent special features, deleted scenes and insightful commentary by the film’s writer/director, Jordan Peele.
There’s so much to cover that you’ll be forgiven if you don’t time to watch it all. Don’t worry, we made the time for you. Here are five important things we learned from Get Out’s special features, and one thing we learned that is extremely unexpected and weird.
Let’s start with that. (SPOILER WARNING: We are going to assume you already saw this film.)
Perceptive audience members may have noticed that the secret society at the heart of Get Out have a strange history together. Their auctions and even their surgeries have a ritualistic appearance, and certain pieces of imagery take on a religious significance, like the deer in the “waiting room” and the Knights Templar helmet that Jeremy wears when he assaults and kidnaps Andrew at the beginning of the film.
According to Jordan Peele there’s a reason for that: the villains of Get Out are the descendants of the Knights Templar, and they are in search of the Holy Grail… or at least the power it promised. “They believe they are destined for immortality and deity status, and over hundreds of years they have worked to figure out through science a way to achieve the power of the Holy Grail,” Peele explains in the film’s commentary track.
Jordan Peele elaborates on this backstory several times throughout the special feature, often providing details that make the story seem weirder than it already looked. For example, in the silent auction in which Chris’s body is purchased, The Red Alchemist’s Society - as Jordan Peele calls them - aren’t actually bidding with money. They’re bidding with Templar artifacts.
“I wanted to keep the particulars of how this auction works pretty mysterious,” Peele explains. “Like, what are the numbers? Are they millions of dollars? Billions of dollars? In my particular lore, which is the one we should go with I think, the Knights Templar who this group descended from were collectors of antiquities and treasures. So I have it in my mind that they trade amongst each other these relics and artifacts, that the numbers he’s holding up are the amount of relics, somehow.”
There are a lot of alternate endings on the Get Out Blu-ray, but most of them are only subtle variations (we’ll discuss those in a moment). The film ends with Chris in a compromising situation, standing over a bloodbath when a police car rolls up. It looks like Chris is going to take the fall… until the big reveal, that it’s actually his friend Rod.
It’s an intensely satisfying finale, but originally the film went in a completely different direction. Rod didn’t get there in time, there were real police - not just TSA - in that car, and Rod was sent to prison after all.
Six months later, Rod shows up to ask Chris for more details, in an effort to prove that a massive conspiracy was taking place. But Chris seems to have come to terms with his situation. “I stopped it,” he says, and walks away, into a prison industrial system that notoriously incarcerates a disproportionate number of black men, because of the legal system disproportionately favors white people. The horror movie is over, but the problem hasn’t been solved.
Jordan Peele explains on the Blu-ray that Get Out was originally written during the Barack Obama administration, and was designed to disprove the pervasive lie that we were living in a post-racial society. At the time, he felt that Chris needed to be a martyr, but during the last election cycle he realized instead that audiences needed a hero.
And for moment, he also thought they needed a Donald Trump joke.
When Jordan Peele shot a new ending for Get Out, he was confident that audiences would be satisfied with Rod coming to the rescue, but he wasn’t sure what Rod should say once Chris got in the car. In the finished version, Rod hilariously says what we all were thinking: “I mean… I told you not to go in that house,” but Jordan Peele shot many different lines of dialogue as he searched for the perfect punchline.
The Blu-ray features quite a few of these alternate jokes, including one where Rod asks if he can use the Armitage’s bathroom, and one where he tells Chris to stop dating white women. But according to Jordan Peele’s commentary, he nearly ended the film with Rod asking Chris a question about his evil girlfriend: “Do you think she voted for Trump?”
“I almost did this you guys, I almost did it,” Jordan Peele says, but he talked himself out of it. “First of all, it argues with the fact that I was kind of going after the liberal elite here. I didn’t want to end it on this note, like sort of confirm people’s expectations that this is like, specifically an anti-Trump movie. It is, in its soul, but it’s anti something bigger, which is racism and the system that has been in place long before Donald Trump.”
“So I didn’t want to confuse that,” Peele concluded. “And I didn’t want to date the film [with a topical reference].”
The trailer for Get Out features an unforgettable scare in which Chris, in The Sunken Place, gets attacked by the skeleton ghost of the deer he ran over at the beginning of the movie. So it was pretty weird to discover that this scene isn’t in the finished film, at all.
On the Blu-ray you can finally see the sequence in its entirety. It takes place after Chris finally tries to leave the house and gets hypnotized by Missy, and collapses into The Sunken Place, right there in the living room. He’s trapped in the void and tries to use his lighter, not noticing that the flickering light is revealing an ominous presence behind him… a ghost deer which only attacks once the lighter finally works.
“The deer, they used it in the trailer, and in full transparency I requested that they didn’t, but they felt that it would help entice the audience, specifically the horror audience,” Jordan Peele confesses. “It worked, so kudos to them. I knew some people would be disappointed when they don’t see this this deer, but I also kinda knew they wouldn’t be disappointed because the main reason I cut this is because it didn’t look good enough to me, and I knew I would have to put more money into it, VFX-wise, and it just didn’t seem essential to tell the story, and it might be a losing battle.”
When Chris gets hypnotized he falls into The Sunken Place, a black void in which he is perpetually falling, and perpetually looking outwards, a spectator in his own story. In the commentary, Jordan Peele describes the sensation as, “You know when you’re about to fall asleep and you feel like you’re falling, but you catch yourself and you wake up? Well, what if you never caught yourself? Where would you fall? Where would you go into?”
Well, it turns out that every character has a different Sunken Place, filled with their own personal fears.
“Just to blow your minds for one second, you know in my mind The Sunken Place is experienced differently for everyone else. It is a state of mind that is created by your own brain, based on Missy sort of latching onto your deepest fear or your darkest moment. So that Andre, the woman who is Georgina, or Walter all live in some sort of marginalized state where they can see through the eyes of their captor, but they can’t do anything.”
“But everyone’s room in The Sunken Place would look different,” he concludes.
Get Out is a social thriller, which means that an enormous part of its impact relies on cultural criticism and allegory. And although The Sunken Place may have obvious interpretations pertaining America’s prison system, it’s also a commentary about the experience of black horror fans.
“The Sunken Place, among other things, it is a metaphor for the marginalization of the black horror movie audience. We are a loyal horror movie fanbase and we’re relegated to the theater, not the screen. We don’t have the representation of our skin in horror films, nor do we have representation of our sensibilities and our ability to observe trouble before it happens, and our ability to excuse ourselves,” Jordan Peele explains.
“It also, of course, conjures the Eddie Murphy routine where he’s talking about The Amityville Horror, and that a black family would deal in that situation differently. ‘GET OUT’ ‘Too bad we can’t stay, honey!’ One of the great comedy bits,” Peele muses.
But of course there are other interpretations. “This movie for me was an answer to the lack of representation,” Peele continues. “And […] our lack of ability to talk about race, specifically the prison industrial system complex, and the disproportionate number of black people, mostly men, who are literally abducted, thrown into a hole and tossed to the back of our minds, literally and figuratively, and The Sunken Place is a metaphor for that marginalization.”
Get out is now available on digital download and Blu-ray/DVD. Have you checked out Get Out's bonus features yet? Let us know in the comments!
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