Jordan Peele had never directed or written a film when he helmed the game-changing Get Out. His experience as an improviser and a sketch comic had doubtless given him the tools to create a humorous and tonally complex satire, but no one (including him) knew what a smash success his first venture into filmmaking would be. Get Out put Jordan Peele on the map as a director, and he became the third person in history (after Warren Beatty and James L. Brooks) to get nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay for his first film.
Peele said that he was inspired by both non-horror films such as Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and horror films that border on the satirical, such as The Stepford Wives, to create the world of Get Out. He looked at many of the tropes of horror—suspense, someone being hunted while the world doesn't believe them, the creepy underbelly of "normal" middle-class white suburbia—and applied them to tropes of interracial dating and race relations. In an interview with Stephen Colbert, Peele did not say outright whether he thought his film was a comedy, saying instead, "The label of comedy is often a trivial thing. The real question is, what are you laughing at? Are you laughing at the horror, the suffering? Are you disregarding what’s real about this project? That’s why I said, yeah—it’s a documentary.”
The film's success changed the entertainment industry's perception of Peele, who had previously shown up mostly as a comic performer. Get Out established that Peele was an auteur, ready to tackle difficult topics with a deft touch. Peele sees his vision as in keeping with a longstanding tradition in horror, and told Brandon Harris for The New Yorker, “In a social thriller, the monster at hand is society...Whether in an allegorical sense, as in Night of the Living Dead, or in a metaphorical sense, like Rosemary’s Baby. Candyman explores fear of the ghetto, in that case, Cabrini-Green, in Chicago. Misery is about fandom and the way we idolize and worship people. The beauty is that many horror movies and many thrillers do deal with society in some way, but in the social thriller, it’s society that is the villain.”
