To understand the idea of a black man as the protagonist in the horror genre, the film, Night of The Living Dead, must be examined. Night of The Living Dead is a 1968 zombie film, where a group of survivors rallied together to try and stay alive. What made this film different than any of the zombie movies that came before it, was the casting. The lead of the film was a black man named, Duane Jones, who portrayed a character named Ben in the film. Ben was the hero of the film, fending off and killing zombies so they would not kill him and his all-white peers. What this role did for the black community was impactful. It humanized black people during a racially turbulent and divisive time period where blacks were fighting for their civil rights. In the film, Ben was the only black person, to be more specific, black man, in the space. With that status, he had to navigate the racial politics that ensued when he was surrounded by white men and women who would question his authority and judgment solely because he was a black man. With Ben’s leadership throughout the movie, a new narrative was created for black men in the horror genre from the destroyer to the protector.

This character did meet an untimely demise though. At the end, Ben survives the apocalypse and emerges from the farmhouse he and his peers were hiding out in. Once he is out on the porch though, Ben is killed by a group of white police officers. The police take the unnecessary measures of piercing his body with ice picks after shooting him between the eyes, then burning his body amongst scraps. This scene was important because it reflected much of what the time in history really was like and currently with black men and their dealings with police officers. In instances where black men are given excessive force by police even when innocent creating a divide between law enforcement and the black male population of anger, fear, and mistrust. (Funnily enough, Ben was actually never written to be black by the director. Director, George A. Romero, had written the character without race specifications but mentioned that Duane Jones was the best actor in the audition room that day, so he received the job. Although this casting choice was not deliberate on the factor of race, it made the movie much more powerful by providing an insight into what black men go through on a daily basis just by existing.)

Get Out (2017) is a film about a black man named Chris who decides to meet his white girlfriend’s parents (the Armitages) at their family home, which happens to be in a secluded area. What begins as a regular meet the parents movie quickly becomes eerie when Chris notices that he is the only black man in a space where the family and friends are well off and white while the maid and groundskeeper are black, much like a plantation. After many other racially uncomfortable moments, Chris figures out that the family is trying to harvest his brain to put into that of a white man, to transfer his talents in a method called the ‘Coagula Procedure’. This film not only provides a black man as the protagonist but also includes many racial undertones addressed in a complex way so that white audiences could understand the happenings of the black community. What Night of the Living Dead inadvertently has in common with this film is that it tackles issues of race that are common in the black male experience.

After realizing that the Armitage family views black bodies as disposable and only of good use for their talents, Chris needed to end the cycle of the family’s Coagula Procedure. Get Out challenges what one would perceive to occur after Chris kills the Armitage family in a means of self-defense. At the end of the film, when Chris is in the street after the slaying, there are red and blue lights in the distance that appear on the screen. To the viewer, and Chris, Chris is about to be arrested and has no way of proving self-defense, while the blood is clearly on his hands. The movie takes a turn though, and Rod is actually in his TSA car there to save Chris. Usually, in films where the black man is the main character and they commit a crime, the police arresting them without knowledge of the situation is probable. Get Out was written in a racially divided time at the height of social movements like Black Lives Matter combatting the killing of innocent black men and boys. At the time, the film’s director, Jordan Peele, recognized that audiences needed a good ending to the film that would uplift rather than serve as a reminder of the deaths of black men happening around the United States from Trayvon Martin to Mike Brown. That is why Get Out’s ending is so important. It shows that the black man in a horror film can survive and ultimately prevail, without stereotypes of older, usually racist or stereotypical, films being present. The film also provides a deeper meaning to the almost police encounter in the film, that just like Night of the Living Dead: “The police are just as much of a mortal threat to the black protagonist as the evil that he is trying to outrun” (Coleman).

*Further Get Out analysis can be found under "The Hidden White Supremacy of Get Out"