Rosemary's Baby

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.

Ari Aster has named it among the films he was working from, and the structure is the same trick: a family tragedy that the audience explains psychologically for most of the running time, and a final scene that says the coven was real and organised all of it. Both films spend their length letting you believe the woman at the centre is unwell, then reveal she was the only one paying attention. Both end with a coronation rather than an escape.