ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Peele’s tour-de-force horror film Get Out, exploring the use of a Black gaze in a film with a predominantly White cast. Shot from the perspective of the protagonist Chris Washington, Peele enjoins viewers to confront head-on the visceral terror of Black precarity. Chris’s girlfriend, the vampiric Rose Armitage, embodies what I term ally betrayal, whereby White individuals earn the trust of Black people only to viciously violate it in order to further realize the aims of a White-supremacist social order. In the process, Peele exposes the fallacy of White innocence, showing instead the ways in which White women leverage the myth of their vulnerability to delimit Black agency and bodily autonomy.
