Jordan Peele’s compelling new movie Get Out is a fresh twist on the classic horror movie genre as it explores the darkest form of racial injustice.

The movie has a nearly impossible rating of 99% on Rotten Tomatoes for good reason.  Though Peele started producing the film even before Obama’s presidency, the subject of the movie has never been more relevant.

The premise of Peele’s film is that a young black man, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), visits his white girlfriend’s family estate in rich, white suburb.  Before going, Chris asks his girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams), if her family is aware that he’s black.  She claims that her family is not racist at all, and would “vote for Obama another term if they could.”

The initial meeting of the parents seems nothing but awkward at first, but the strange behavior of people, notably the African American workers in the suburb, is a cause of questioning for Chris.

From there, the trip is downhill for Chris, and the movie takes a twisted turn for the worst.

Get Out is by far one of the most honest movies I’ve seen.  What sets it apart from the average horror movie is that the fears are real; the movie doesn’t just focus on the all-too-predictable scary movie subjects such as ‘demons’ and ‘hauntings.’

The injustice that African American men and women face is real, it’s raw and it’s happening right now, which is what makes the film so powerful.

THE ALTERNATE ENDING

(SPOILER ALERT! Don’t read if you plan to watch the movie, which you should!)

The ending of the film results in Chris killing Rose and her family for self-protection, due to the fact that they were planning to use his body for their “family business” (AKA their abduction of black males and females in order to use their bodies for slavery, and for white people to live within them.) (Yeah, that happens.)

After he escapes the family home where he was kept in the basement, awaiting the procedure which transfers the white person’s brain to the abductee’s brain, his friend picks him up in a police car and he is rescued.

The film’s movie-version ending is much lighter than the alternate/original ending.

The alternate ending concludes with Chris still killing his girlfriend and her family, but Chris is arrested because of how the gruesome scene looks to police.  Even though he was captured and was going to be a slave to the white family, police assumed another black man had murdered “innocent white people”.

The ending is a very powerful example of real-world prejudice. Peele ultimately decided to go with a fairer ending, one that didn’t include such tense topics.  At the time of the movie’s release, there was a lot of racial tension with the presidential election, so Peele opted to take it out

I would argue that the alternate ending should have been the only ending, because racial injustice in America needs to be exposed, and the alternate ending of Get Out was could shine a light to a prevalent problem and encourage others to take a stand and acknowledge racial injustice.