Jordan Peele has named Rosemary's Baby repeatedly as a direct model, and it is the film he points at when he explains what social horror is: the threat is a polite social circle, and the victim's problem is that nobody believes them. What Get Out takes:
- A protagonist delivered into a group of welcoming, liberal, well-off older people whose warmth is the trap
- A partner who is inside the conspiracy, which turns every reassurance into evidence in hindsight
- Gaslighting as the actual mechanism of the horror, with the audience ahead of the protagonist and unable to help
- A body taken over for someone else's use, with the victim still present inside it
- The doctor, the drink and the ritual assembly of neighbours, all played as ordinary hospitality
Filed HIGH: the mechanism, the reveal and the reason the audience cannot warn anyone are all Levin's and Polanski's, moved from a Manhattan apartment building to a house in the suburbs.