[Although Black Panther has already busted just
about every conceivable block, Memorial Day launches the summer blockbuster
season. So this week I wanted to return
to some BlockbusterStudying, focusing especially on big hits from last
year. Add your BlockbusterStudying thoughts, please!]
On three of the
many horror
and genre film contexts for Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning
game-changing smash
hit.
1)
The Stepford Wives
(1975): I think it’s fair to say that Bryan Forbes’s suburban sci-fi horror film
(based on Ira
Levin’s 1972 novel and with a screenplay by the great William Goldman) was
one of the most direct influences on Peele’s film. While there are of course
plenty of differences (thanks to Peele’s background in comedy, for example, Get Out is far funnier than Stepford, part of the reason why the Golden
Globes had a famously hard time pinning down Get Out’s category), the two films share a key goal: turning images
of suburban perfection (and really in many ways the American Dream) on their
heads, and in the process considering what such images mean for communities of
marginalized and oppressed Americans. It’s easy to forget (especially given the
terrible
2004 remake) just how ground-breaking Stepford
was in that regard; maybe a double-feature with Get Out to remind us?
2)
Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (1956): Adapted from Jack
Finney’s 1954 novel The Body
Snatchers, Don Siegel’s sci-fi horror film (which has been remade
at least three times, but as usual go to the original) depicts an alien
invasion where the goal is literally to take over the planet, one snatched
human body at a time. The novel and film’s concept of “pod people” seems to me
to be an important origin point for (or at least influence on) the distinct
body takeovers present in stories like Stepford
and Get Out, as well as in zombie
films like Night of the Living Dead
(1968) for that matter. Yet there’s an important difference, and it’s
particularly central to Peele’s film: that the villains taking over bodies here
are fellow humans, and ones doing so based on an overt prejudice toward members
of that community. We have met the body snatchers, that is, and they are us.
3)
The Last House on the Left
(1972): This one is a good bit less obvious, but bear with me. At the heart
of horror legend Wes
Craven’s directorial debut (he also wrote and edited the film) is a crucial
contrast between a gang of vicious thugs and an innocent suburban family; what
makes the film’s second half especially shocking and brutal is that it’s the
surviving family members who turn on the thugs, becoming even more violent than
them in the process. Interestingly, Peele’s film could be described in parallel
yet opposite ways: in Get Out the
nice suburban family are the gang of vicious thugs, and it’s the innocent outsider
(who’s with their daughter, if in this case consensually) who in the film’s
final section has to become even more violent than them if he’s to survive and
exact his revenge. I can’t say for sure that Peele was thinking about Craven’s
film at all, but I will say that it’s precisely that kind of script-flipping
that makes Get Out such a wonderful
and important blockbuster.
May Recap this
weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other blockbusters you’d highlight and analyze?
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