Horror
Being a horror film, Get Out is, unsurprisingly, fixated on the horrific, whether that be the horrors of the everyday or the more explicit horrors of a basement racial laboratory. From the first moment, horror and the ways that different people experience different places as "horrific" is a central theme in the film. The first few moments show Andre, a black man, walking down a sidewalk in the suburbs at night. The community seems affluent and safe in a traditional sense, but we soon realize that this white suburbia is anything but safe for an unchaperoned black man. It doesn't take long for a mysterious car to pull up next to Andre and for its masked driver to attack him, render him unconscious, and throw him in the backseat.
The horror continues unfolding from there. First, on their way upstate, Rose and Chris hit a deer with their car. It is not particularly far-fetched an event, given that they are driving through a wooded area, but the moment is startling and upsetting, especially for Chris, who is driving. Then, at the house, the horrors start adding up, from the vacant smiles of the black in-house staff to Missy's insistence on hypnotizing Chris to Dean's weird use of ebonics and his assurance that he would have voted for Obama a third time. All these smaller horrors are, for Chris, deeply unsettling, and the film excels at showing the viewer how the casual racism of the everyday is, in and of itself, deeply scary. Then, in the final section of the film, the true horrors reveal themselves, and we see that the Armitages were evil scientists all along.
Talent
Part of what the white characters in the film are so obsessed with about Chris is his perceived superiority. While racism is usually framed as the perception of another race as inferior, Get Out exposes the white characters' fascination with black bodies as being much closer to envy and covetousness than condescension. Dean tells Chris that his father was beaten by a black runner, Jesse Owens, in the qualifying rounds for the 1936 Olympics, and at the party, various guests comment on many qualities of Chris', from his physique to his artistic talent as a photographer. As it is later revealed, the process that the Armitages have developed is all about transplanting a white brain into a black body and thereby transferring the talent of the black individual to the white consciousness. Jim Hudson wants to transplant his brain into Chris' skull because he desires to see and to take pictures with Chris' skill.
"The Sunken Place" and Trauma
When Chris is first getting to know the Armitages, they ask about his parents. He tells them that his father wasn't around and that his mother was killed in a hit-and-run, but he doesn't like to talk about it very much. Missy, a psychiatrist who specializes in hypnotherapy, lures Chris into her office one night and begins asking him questions about his mother's death. It turns out that Chris has many traumatic memories around the event, and feels partially responsible for the death, because he didn't call the police until the next day. As Missy hypnotizes Chris and brings him through the memory, he falls into what she refers to as "the Sunken Place." In the film, the image of the Sunken Place is one of Chris falling through space, looking up at a far away window of what is happening outside his body. His physical body is immobilized, but his consciousness remains. The Sunken Place is a state that is brought on by the hypnosis, but it is also an allegory for Chris' relationship to his own trauma, his sense of powerlessness and his deep despair about the event.
Race
Race is perhaps the single most prevalent theme in the film. From the beginning, we see a world in which the interracial relationship between Rose and Chris poses some complications. He asks Rose whether she told her parents he is black before taking him home, worried that they might be shocked and act disrespectfully towards him if they are not warned. On their way to the house, Chris and Rose are pulled over by a white policeman, who asks to see Chris's identification, but Rose stands up for him, accusing the police officer of profiling Chris based on his race.
At the Armitage house, Chris' race is not a "big deal" per se, but the family's awkwardness about blackness, sometimes expressed through an emphatic insistence on their own "wokeness," becomes its own racism. For instance, Dean tells Chris (as Rose predicted) that he would have voted for Obama a third time, and refers to him as "my man" throughout their visit. Missy is rude to Georgina, the black housekeeper, in a way that feels racially charged. Rose's brother, Jeremy, is perhaps the most unsettling member of the family, engaging Chris on the fact that he is stronger due to his race, before challenging him to a fight. The film takes a recognizable scenario—a young black man meeting his white girlfriend's family—and keeps pushing it into creepier and creepier territory, until it is a full-blown horror.
Escape
The title alone tells us that a big theme of the film will be escape. Chris does his best to get along with the Armitage family the first night, in spite of some hiccups. At the party on the second day, however, after Chris takes a photo of Logan with his camera, Logan seems to snap out of a trance and grabs Chris, telling him, "Get out!" It is a chilling warning, because it seems like the first genuine thing Logan has said in the whole interaction. Chris takes the warning seriously, and wants to leave as soon as possible, shaken by the encounter and by the strange things that have been happening. While he thinks that Rose will help him escape, it is soon revealed that she has been in on trapping him the whole time, and that he is the victim of an elaborate kidnapping plot. For the rest of the film, after Chris is trapped in the basement, his' sole desire is to escape by whatever means necessary.
Romance
The whole premise of the film is based around a girl bringing the boy she's dating to meet her family. This scenario is a recognizable one to most, and throughout, the thing keeping Chris in the unsettling environment is his love for Rose. At one point he tells her she is all he has, and the couple share many heartfelt moments throughout. Rose assures Chris time and time again that she has his back, even when her family is being particularly weird or doing something that makes Chris feel alienated. This romantic connection that is established is what makes Rose's eventual betrayal so horrific. The viewer is meant to think that she is on Chris' side, but she is in fact just as cold-hearted and evil as her family.
Slavery
The operation at the Armitage house essentially reimagines the institution of chattel slavery. The members of the "Order of the Coagula," founded by Dean Armitage's father, coerce black people into captivity, take control of their bodies, and use them for their own purposes. Dean holds a silent auction over who will get to transplant their brain into Chris' body, a scene that hearkens back to auctions that occurred within the institution of slavery. Black people are lured, either through violence (as in the case of Andre) or more manipulative means (as in the case of Rose seducing Chris), to the house, where they are then exploited. Georgina and Walter, for example, are not just black servants in a white household, but black people who have been stripped of their humanity and their autonomy.
