Get Out & A Quiet Place: Horror stories for our times

[SPOILER ALERT: This article contains plot spoilers for both Get Out and A Quiet Place]

In years to come, horror films will be dug up and pored over. They are the fossils that tell of our greatest fears as well as our repressed fantasies. When we're worried about the rich, we dream of vampires: the ultimate one percenters, hypnotising us with their sexy bullshit and sucking the life out of us. When we're worried about the poor, zombies walk the Earth: appallingly dressed, poor personal hygiene and bad posture, an overwhelming mob with its origins far away. The Blair Witch Project scared us with camcorders and agoraphobia; Paranormal Activity with personal security and domestic claustrophobia. And now, in the space of little over a year, two important new horror films have been released that give very different perspectives on what is happening in Donald Trump’s America right now.

Jordan Peele’s Get Out and John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place have a lot in common. They both have original twists on familiar premises. Both are well made, highly entertaining and, being directed by comic actors, they each also retain a dark humourous intelligence in the midst of the jumps, so much so that Peele’s film was even nominated in the Best Musical or Comedy category at the Golden Globes. Both films are set in the same place – upstate New York – and both are about a lack of agency, a voicelessness, the dangers of a malign power that oppresses us and keeps us suffering in silence.

But these films are also very different.

Get Out is black. It appealed to black audiences; its hero Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) is black; its victims are black; and it speaks directly and explicitly to the black experience in America today. Centred on a black man going to meet his white girlfriend’s parents for the first time, it’s Look Who’s Coming to Dinner meets The Stepford Wives. Inspired as a counter-argument to the ‘post-racism’ self-congratulation that greeted the Obama presidency, Peele’s idea preceded the Black Lives Matter movement and Donald Trump’s election, but is directly inspired by the conditions that gave rise to both.

A Quiet Place, on the other hand, is white. Sooo white. Emily Blunt and John Krasinski star as the parents of a traditional nuclear family, surviving an invasion of monsters who are hypersensitive to sound.

The upstate New York setting in both films is shown as populated by residents as white as their picket fences. In Get Out, Chris feels himself to be an outsider immediately, despite/because of the welcome of his girlfriend’s family. “I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could’ve,” her dad (played by the West Wing’s Bradley Whitford) hamfistedly boasts. The Blunt-Krasinski family of A Quiet Place also appear to be liberals with a conservative undercurrent. They eat off kale leaves to avoid using noisy plates and play board games. Like many apocalyptic movies, A Quiet Place has a repressed fantasy lurking beneath the fear. The family home is a survivalist wet dream but with Wes Anderson in charge of the bunker. And what young parent doesn’t, in the early hours of the morning, dream of an apocalypse that means the kids have to actually shut up or die?

In A Quiet Place, the whiteness is unremarked upon and unremarkable. And here we have another difference. Whereas Get Out was immediately seen as a strong social commentary, chiming with the times, the politics of A Quiet Place are largely invisible and mostly hushed up. The ideology of the powerful tends to disguise itself as ‘just the way things are’. So the survivors MAGA back to a traditional rural family; Mum heavily pregnant, Dad teaching his son to fish, daughter told to stay at home and help Mum. The daughter (Millicent Simmonds), who is deaf, rebels, almost disastrously. In Peele’s movie, the family itself is the trap, the countryside dangerous and traditional, redolent of exploitation and oppression.

Both films feature a malignant silencing. In A Quiet Place, the family has to be silent because of the vicious monsters who use sound to hunt. But they have an advantage in the sign language they already know, having a hearing impaired daughter. Their silence is an extreme strategy, and they have worked out some loopholes. This is another aspect of the way A Quiet Place can serve as a post-Trump fantasy. Let’s just shut up, batten down the hatches and just quieten down until this all passes over. If we can’t go to Canada, maybe Canada can come to us. For the black victims of Get Out, silence is imposed on them via hypnosis. They are literally brainwashed so the white people can inhabit their bodies. There is no strategy to employ short of the shouted imperative of the title of the movie.

In the end the main difference between the movies can be rooted back to vampires v zombies, though in this case the zombies are monsters. Get Out is a vampire movie. The white privileged middle class benefits from the oppression of black people: it sucks out their vitality, baits them with sex and literally hypnotises them and takes over their bodies while their true identities are pushed into the ‘sunken place’. The Armitage family represent a microcosm of a society-wide problem.

In A Quiet Place, the danger comes from without (we don’t really know where – outerspace, underground, Mexico?) and the only hope of survival is to retreat, defend and keep the family shotgun close at hand. For Krasinski, the horror is an aberration, a collapse, an upset in the way things should be. Alien invasion or President Trump could both fall into that category. For Jordan Peele, however, the horror is the way things actually are.

This is also true of the films' endings. In the original ending of Get Out, Chris ends up incarcerated, along with many other black men, an easily recognisable version of the ‘sunken place’. But even in the version we have – where Chris' friend arrives in a TSA vehicle, emergency lights flashing, to rescue him – the twist only works because we expect that Chris is going to be shot by the cops; that would represent the resumption of normality.

For A Quiet Place there is much more hope. Once Dad is out of the way and the daughter is allowed into the cellar of knowledge, the family can escape via the glaring plothole. Who knew monsters that are hypersensitive to sound would be hypersensitive to sound?

Ultimately, the white middle class will survive Trump, the way they’ve survived everything. They might even defeat him. But for Chris and Black America, Trump has simply revealed what they knew was there all along.

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A Quiet Place is in cinemas now from Paramount Pictures; Get Out is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Universal Pictures