In interviews about Get Out, Jordan Peele said that one of his primary influences for the film was The Stepford Wives, Brian Forbes' 1975 horror film satirizing gender relations and the stultifying effects of housewifery among the yuppie New England set. Peele categorized this kind of film as a "social thriller" and included Rosemary's Baby, Candyman, and Misery in his list of films of this kind, saying, "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.” Society is certainly the villain in Get Out, and more particularly, the societal structures of the predominately white suburbs.
The suburbs are a tried and true setting for the horror genre. Slasher movies like Scream, Halloween, The Stepford Wives, and Poltergeist all take the pristine lawns and idyllic interiors of the suburbs as a jumping off point for revealing the darknesses that lie beneath the surface of human experience. Perhaps it is the fact that the suburbs represent safety to so many people—a refuge from the dangers and grittiness of urban life, or a community of structure and support against the wildness of the rural—that make them such a perfect playground for terror.
What distinguishes Get Out from these other films is the fact that it never paints the suburbs as particularly trustworthy or safe. Because of the way the film is engaging with the topic of race, the script is entirely flipped, and the viewer is led to see the suburbs as dangerous and alienating from the start. While other horror movies of this kind rest on the assumption that the suburbs are where people go to feel safe, Get Out harbors no such preconceptions. From the first scene, in which Andre wanders the treelined streets of a predominately white suburb complaining to his friend on the phone that he feels like a "sore thumb," the viewer is led to see the suburbs as already menacing, even before Andre gets attacked by a masked assailant.
