“Unimaginable from this distance”: Get Out, Black Speculative Horror, and Captive Embodiment

In this essay, which attends to Jordan Peele’s 2017 Black horror masterpiece, Get Out, I consider how Peele’s visual narrative employs not only horror’s genre cues, but speculative tropes more broadly, to animate instances of embodied Black trauma and white gratification that can be linked directly to submerged American histories of enslavement. Hortense Spillers has memorably catalogued slavery’s “theft of the body—a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire”; my analysis in this essay zeroes in on her almost casual parenthetical recognition that this violence is “unimaginable” from our present vantage and interrogates the ways that Peele’s complex brand of Black horror brings such bodily trespass close. Throughout my discussion here, I consider both the bodily vulnerability of the film’s Black characters to racialized incursion and subjection, and their positioning as literal vehicles for the enactment of white agency, suggesting that the surface critique of liberal racism offered by Get Out is complicated and deepened by the film’s speculative horror elements. By animating and bringing near, via speculative horror tropes, some of the most “unimaginable” elements of anti-Black violence, Peele’s film advances an understanding of Black captive embodiment that uncannily echoes Afro-Pessimism’s sense of the perpetual and proximate nature of Black enslavement in our contemporary moment.