Get Out: A Horror Story of Medicine

Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) tells the story of Chris, who visits his girlfriend Rose’s family estate and discovers that the Armitage family has sinister plans that involve the appropriation of Black bodies. The film blends horror and satire to dramatize the social and psychological realities of racism, using genre conventions to make visible dynamics that Black Americans experience daily.

Before exploring Get Out through the lens of medicine and surgery, it’s important to acknowledge the rich conversation the film has already inspired, especially from Black critics and commentators who interpret its social critique through lived experience. From the start, Get Out was celebrated not just as an inventive horror but as a focused commentary on race in America. Writers have highlighted how Peele used the horror genre to capture the insidiousness of liberal racism, microaggressions, and the commodification of Black people. (TheWrap, The Searcher Journal, CBS News)

These perspectives deepen our understanding of the film as a sociopolitical text. My aim here is to explore how Get Out’s themes resonate within medicine, where the objectification, extraction, and dehumanization of Black bodies have been overwhelmingly documented and materially consequential.

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Trust Is a Risk

From the moment Chris accepts Rose’s invitation, he must navigate his ambivalence about entering a predominantly white space and the potential risks to his emotional and physical safety. As viewers, we feel a growing anticipation that something will go wrong, an expectation shaped by the conventions of the genre and by lessons passed through cultural experience. Get Out leverages genre tropes to make the audience viscerally feel Chris’ vulnerability and hypervigilance.

Routine medical encounters can evoke a similar tension. The legacy of medical experimentation in the United States such as the well documented cases of J. Marion Sims’ surgical experiments on enslaved women, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and Henrietta Lacks, reminds us that medical institutions are not neutral. These lessons are reinforced both by historical knowledge and by personal or witnessed experiences of harm in healthcare settings, creating a heightened awareness of potential risk in spaces that should offer safety.

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Curiosity Without Humanization

In Act 1, we witness the onslaught of microaggressions that Chris endures. From his encounter with the police officer, to his arrival at the Armitage house, the dinner with the family, and the garden party. We see each interaction from Chris’ vantage point and feel the cumulative effect on his sense of safety, tension, and self-preservation. The Armitage family and their guests’ entitlement to his body and inherent dismissal of his personhood perpetuate this insidious form of dehumanization.

In medicine, one way this dynamic emerges is in the “interesting case” phenomenon: patients reduced to teaching material or research subjects. Curiosity without relational accountability reinforces a hierarchy in which the patient’s lived experience is secondary to professional gain. Academic medicine, still grappling with structural racism, reproduce this dynamic, making it imperative for clinicians to reflect on how training structures and institutional authority perpetuate harm.

The Sunken Place of Care

Get Out elicits a fear that is equal parts sudden and lingering. In one scene, Chris is startled when Walter runs at him from the dark. Shaken and seeking refuge inside, he encounters Missy Armitage, the matriarch and family psychiatrist, who leverages his disarmed and vulnerable state to coerce him into hypnosis. As viewers, we feel the tension; we are racing to anticipate what is happening before Chris fully realizes it. The scene captures both the immediate threat and the unsettling calm that can accompany the anticipation of harm.

The power dynamic between Chris and Missy mirrors that of patient and psychiatrist. Trauma and moments of crisis, like Chris’ heightened fear, are weaponized as a means to control. The Sunken Place becomes a visual metaphor for subjugation and for the ways medical systems can institutionalize control. Missy immobilizes Chris while leaving him fully conscious, forcing him into awareness without agency.

In clinical contexts, a similar experience can occur when patients in distress are overruled, dismissed, or treated primarily as subjects rather than partners. Vulnerability can be pathologized or exploited through coercive interventions, rigid hierarchies, or subtle dismissal of patient autonomy. These dynamics create a “Sunken Place” in care: patients are acutely aware of what is happening to them but lack the power to intervene. Recognizing how trauma and crisis can be weaponized is essential to ethical practice and to protecting patient agency.

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Medical Advancement over Dignity

The scene in the basement elicits a visceral fear: Chris confronted with restraints, immobilized, and fully aware of what is about to happen. The restraints themselves evoke historical echoes: devices developed in the 18th and 19th centuries to forcibly immobilize patients, from Benjamin Rush’s 1810 “tranquilizer chair,” which aimed to calm patients through restriction, to 19th-century surgical straps used before anesthesia, and later apparatuses for childbirth and psychiatric care. These tools of control, while presented as clinical innovations, relied on coercion and dehumanization.

The Coagula procedure, the literal occupation of Black bodies, designed by the Armitage legacy family of neurosurgeons, mirrors how surgical practice has forcefully extracted knowledge and advancement from marginalized people (see Medical Apartheid). Black Americans have forcibly endured the violence of medical advancement without benefit, and with experiences of profound, intergenerational harm since the conception of modern American medicine. Prestigious institutions that generate innovation without addressing inequities in access, treatment, or outcomes remain complicit (The Conversation). The scene crystallizes both the horror of Chris’ immediate experience and the broader pattern of medical exploitation, making visible the stakes of systemic extraction and the human cost behind scientific progress.

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Seeing the Whole Patient

Nearly a decade after its release, Get Out remains evergreen. The emotional rollercoaster it takes viewers on mirrors, in small but telling ways, the chronic vigilance that accompanies medical racism and persistent health inequities. In Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington recounts the power of socialization into harm through diary entries from a medical student who initially expressed disgust at unethical experimentation, only to later rationalize and enact dehumanizing practices himself. Peele’s film offers a similar warning: harm is often perpetuated not solely by overt malice, but by individuals shaped within systems that normalize exploitation and dull moral alarm.

In healthcare, we still have far to go in acknowledging and addressing the legacy of medical racism and its ongoing harm. Peele challenges us to interrogate our assumptions and confront the historical and contemporary subjugation of Black people. Engaging with artistic and scholarly works that unsettle us is one way to begin examining how we have internalized these forces. Ethical medicine demands humility, structural awareness, and a commitment to truly seeing patients as whole people whose consciousness, dignity, and safety matter.

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