Audiences who witnessed Get Out were treated to various ends of the emotional spectrum, with some scenes being hilarious and others being horrifying. Writer/director Jordan Peele even got so caught up in crafting the film that writing one scene brought him to tears, despite those tears feeling “cathartic.”
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“There was a point in the process where I got to something that was very vulnerable,” Peele shared at Audi’s 2018 Writers Guild Association Beyond Words Panel. “The fun evolved into tears. I mean, when I was writing the scene about Chris in the hypnosis and The Sunken Place, I ended that day crying, and it was a cathartic thing. I wouldn’t describe it as fun.”
In the context of the film, the “Sunken Place” is where Chris’ (Daniel Kaluuya) mind descends into under hypnosis by his girlfriend’s mother in an effort to gain complete control over him.
Not only is it a powerful scene in the film, but it also represents something far more sinister that has permeated our society.
“This one specifically became a metaphor for the prison-industrial complex, the lack of representation of black people in film, in genre,” Peele shared during a Los Angeles Times roundtable last year. “The reason Chris in the film is falling into this place, being forced to watch this screen, that no matter how hard he screams at the screen he can’t get agency across. He’s not represented. And that, to me, was this metaphor for the black horror audience, a very loyal fan base who comes to these movies, and we’re the ones that are going to die first. So the movie for me became almost about representation within the genre, within itself, in a weird way.”
The filmmaker also detailed more about what the Sunken Place refers to in the film and how he realized its meaning extended well beyond the film’s plot.
“You know when you’re going to sleep and it feels like you’re about to fall, so you wake up? What if you never woke up? Where would you fall? And that was kind of the most harrowing idea to me,” the filmmaker confessed. “And as I’m writing it becomes clear that the sunken place is this metaphor for the system that is suppressing the freedom of black people, of many outsiders, many minorities. There’s lots of different sunken places.”
Horror fans aren’t the only ones to appreciate the film’s incredible achievements, as it’s been nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Actor, Best Picture and Best Director.
Get Out can be seen in select theaters now, in addition to being available on Blu-ray, DVD and VOD.
[H/T JoBlo]
