Get Out is Jordan Peele’s directorial debut, a psychological horror movie that also touches on serious and very important topics. After becoming known for his comedic works as one half of the groundbreaking comedy duo Key & Peele, Jordan Peele has now earned a spot as one of the best writers and directors in the horror genre, and it all started with Get Out. Released in 2017, Get Out introduced the audience to Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young Black photographer dating Rose Armitage (Allison Williams), a young white woman.
Rose and Chris travel to Upstate New York to spend the weekend with Rose’s parents, this being the first time Chris meets them. However, once there, Chris slowly begins to notice strange things happening around him, and he ends up uncovering some shocking secrets about Rose, her family, and their closest friends. Get Out was a critical and commercial success, and it sparked a lot of conversation due to its twists, ending, and the themes addressed in it — and here’s what happens at the end of Get Out and the movie’s real meaning.
The Armitages’ Real Plan In Get Out Explained
Rose’s Family Used Young Black People To Gain Immortality
Chris was initially nervous about meeting Rose’s parents as he didn’t know if they knew their daughter was dating a Black man. Rose assured him that wouldn’t be a problem — and she wasn’t lying, as Dean (Bradley Whitford) and Missy (Catherine Keener) were very welcoming of Chris, though too welcoming. Dean was a neurosurgeon and Missy was a psychiatrist, who as soon as she learned Chris was trying to quit smoking, was too eager to help cure him of this habit through an unsettling procedure that involved sending his consciousness into an out-of-body state she calls “the sunken place.”
Get Out
took a sinister turn while Chris and Rose went out for a walk, as the partygoers were shown playing a game of “bingo” that slowly revealed itself to be an auction where they were
placing bids on Chris.
The following day, the Armitages hosted a party attended by all their (white) wealthy friends, and though they were also nice to Chris, they also behaved in just inappropriate enough ways by over-complimenting Chris’s physique, asking about the “genetic advantages” of Black people, and gushing about their admiration for Black celebrities like Tiger Woods. Get Out took a sinister turn while Chris and Rose went out for a walk, as the partygoers were shown playing a game of “bingo” that slowly revealed itself to be an auction where they were placing bids on Chris.
The Armitage family and their wealthy friends were part of a secretive cult called the Order of the Coagula, formed by white people only. The Order of the Coagula was founded by Rose’s grandfather, Roman Armitage, and with the help and knowledge of Dean, they developed a way in which they could extend their and their friends’ lives.
For this, they kidnapped Black people to hypnotize them and subject them to a surgical procedure in which half their brain was left intact, but the rest was replaced by the brain of one of the members of the Order. By keeping part of their victim’s brain, the person kept their consciousness, but due to the hypnosis they were put into thanks to Missy, they were trapped in the “sunken place” while the member of the Order had full control of everything else.
Every member of the Armitage family played a role in this horrible practice
Every member of the Armitage family played a role in this horrible practice: Rose and her brother, Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones), were in charge of finding suitable subjects (Rose seduced them and Jeremy abducted them), Missy prepared them through hypnosis, and Dean was in charge of the brain transplant. If that wasn’t disturbing enough, Dean’s parents went through this procedure and were still alive now in the bodies of Walter, the groundskeeper, and Georgina, the housemaid.
What Happens To Chris At The End of Get Out
Chris Managed To Get Away, But His Eventual Fate Was Unknown
Even though Chris was warned by his best friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery), half-joking and half-seriously, about going to Rose’s family home and meeting her parents, Chris went along with the plan, but he soon noticed a lot of strange things happening around him. After accidentally causing “Logan” (LaKeith Stanfield) to snap, Chris started to suspect there was something going on with the Black people associated with the Armitages and their friends.
As he prepared to leave, Chris found a box in Rose’s room containing various photos of Rose and her previous partners, all of them Black people, even though she claimed Chris was the first Black man she dated. Even worse, among those partners were Walter and Georgina, who were used to keep Rose’s grandparents alive. Rose eventually showed her true colors and Chris, thanks to Missy’s hypnosis, was knocked out and taken to the basement, where he would be prepared for surgery.
Chris scratched the chair he was tied to and used the cotton stuffing to plug his ears, thus blocking the hypnosis trigger as it was shown on a TV in front of him
Chris scratched the chair he was tied to and used the cotton stuffing to plug his ears, thus blocking the hypnosis trigger as it was shown on a TV in front of him, and when Jeremy arrived to take him to the operation room, Chris fought back and bludgeoned Jeremy unconscious. Chris then impaled Dean with the antlers of a deer mount, knocking over a candle and setting the OR on fire. Chris came across Missy in the living room and stabbed her, but Jeremy suddenly appeared and attacked him again. Chris eventually overpowered Jeremy and beat him to death.
Chris took Jeremy’s car keys and started driving away, but after hitting Georgina, she attacked him and made him crash. Following an attack from Walter, who shot Rose, Chris was finally rescued by Rod, who after not receiving help from the police, decided to help his friend himself. Chris and Rod drove away and left Rose to bleed out on the road, and Chris became the only real survivor of the horrors of the Order of the Coagula. However, it’s unclear what happened next to Chris.
Chris Tries To Save Georgina Because Of His Own Mother
Guilt From Childhood Meant Chris Nearly Made A Fatal Mistake
While driving away from the Armitages’ home, Chris hit Georgina with the car and knocked her unconscious, but he got out of the car to help her and carried her into the car. Chris was unaware that Georgina was possessed by Rose’s grandmother, but this became clear when she awoke and attacked him, causing him to crash, with Georgina dying after the hit. Chris tried to save Georgina because of the guilt of his mother’s death, a traumatic experience that Rose and Missy used to better control Chris through hypnosis.
Chris’ mom was killed in a hit-and-run when he was 11
Chris’ mom was killed in a hit-and-run when he was 11, and he felt responsible for her death as he took too long to call for help, and instead, he kept watching TV. Hitting Georgina with the car was reminiscent of his mother’s accident, and in an attempt to make up for his past mistake, he did his best to save her.
Why Walter Takes His Own Life After Shooting Rose
Walter’s Trauma Was Too Much For Him To Carry On
After crashing the car and Georgina dying as a result, an armed Rose appeared to kill Chris, and asked her grandfather, who lived in Walter’s body, to take Chris down. Chris used his phone camera’s flash to snap Walter out of his trance, regaining control of his body. Walter took Rose’s rifle, supposedly to shoot Chris, but shot Rose instead.
Related
Get Out: Why Walter Runs Late At Night
The surreal Get Out scene where Chris comes across Walter running at night takes on a new layer of symbolic significance upon rewatching the film.
However, Walter then shot himself in front of Chris. As this was no longer Roman in Walter’s body, and after spending who knows how many years in the sunken place, Walter seized this moment of consciousness and decided to put a definitive end to his suffering.
Why Rose Smiles When Chris Is Choking Her
She Saw Chris’s Violence As Confirmation Of Her Racist Beliefs
After Walter shoots Rose, Chris approaches her and she “apologizes” to him and tells him she loves him, but Chris knows she isn’t sincere. Chris starts choking Rose, and though she is shocked at first, she slowly starts smiling.
Rose knew Chris wouldn’t be able to kill her, but even more disturbing is the fact that, by choking her to death, Rose felt she was proving her and her family’s beliefs of Black men being animalistic, so either way, she would be winning — except that she had been shot and was left to die on the road when Chris was saved by Rod.
Get Out’s Alternative Endings Explained
The Ending Of Get Out Was Nearly Much Worse
Jordan Peele explored other endings for Get Out, but they are quite dark and depressing. In the original ending for Get Out, Chris was arrested after strangling Rose, and Rod visited him in jail. Rod asked Chris for information about the Armitages so he could investigate, but Chris refused by explaining that he stopped them, so everything was fine now.
This alternate ending was intended to reflect the realities of racism
This alternate ending was intended to reflect the realities of racism, but real-life events that happened during production, along with the reception of this ending at test screenings, made Peele opt for a happier ending, though keeping a moment when the audience thinks Chris is about to be arrested.
Another ending would have made a time jump to a couple of months after Chris’ arrival at the Armitages’ home, with Rod sneaking into a gated community looking for him. Rod would have found Chris staring at his own reflection in a window (very much like Georgina used to do), but when he called his name, Chris would have turned to him and said “I assure you, I don’t know who you’re talking about”. This would have meant that Chris was recaptured at some point and that the Armitages’ deaths weren’t enough to stop the Order’s horrific plans.
The Real Meaning Of Get Out’s Ending Explained (& What Jordan Peele Has Said About It)
Although Get Out addresses racism, it doesn’t do so in the “traditional” way Hollywood does, as these villains are Liberals whose obsession with Black people and insistence on their “non-racism” due to their admiration of Black people are precisely what show their racism. The Armitages and the rest of the Order admire Black culture, celebrities, and more. They don’t mind their children dating Black people, but they are obsessed with being in control of them in the deepest, most literal, and most disturbing way possible through the transplants.
What the Order does is a new way of slavery, and interestingly enough, Chris was able to break free by picking cotton, a reference to Black slaves in the US. Jordan Peele has said that even the character of Jim Hudson (Stephen Root), a blind man who was supposed to take over Chris’ body, still played a part in the system of racism despite not seeing Chris’ skin color (via Rolling Stone). Hudson wanted Chris for his eyes, as he believed the eye of a Black artist would give him an advantage, as he was an art dealer.
Hudson reduced Chris to an aesthetic, which makes him no different from the rest of the Order and their shared mentality.
Through this, Hudson reduced Chris to an aesthetic, which makes him no different from the rest of the Order and their shared mentality. Speaking about Get Out and its themes, Jordan Peele told ScreenJunkies that the point is to show that “any time we see color first” or “categorize one another as a race” an important part of what being a human should be is lost.
Peele added that the worst monsters in horror movies are “human beings themselves”, and that even though when people get together beautiful things can be made, they are “also capable of the darkest things”. Get Out perfectly blended social commentary with psychological horror, and it continues to make way for conversations on the themes addressed in it as well as for different interpretations of the story and its characters.
Get Out’s Ending Is More Like Nope Than Us
Us Has Some Incredibly Apocalyptic Implications
Jordan Peele has become one of the most interesting horror directors currently working, and his other two notable movies — 2019’s Us and 2022’s Nope — are also highly regarded and feature dark, twist-filled endings. However, there are definitely more similarities between the conclusion of Nope than there are with Us. In both Nope and Get Out, the ending is left marginally ambiguous when it comes to what happens to the central characters.
While this certainly makes the ending of
Us
chilling, it inspires an entirely different flavor of dread than
Nope
and
Get Out.
Much like Chris in Get Out, OJ in Nope (also played by Daniel Kaluuya) is left at a turning point at the end of the movie, having proof of the Nope alien in the form of photographs but little else to prove to the world what really happened. A key similarity is that Chris will presumably have trouble explaining to the police why all the residents at the Armitage household are dead, and OJ has also just gone through a traumatic event to which several deaths and disappearances are linked — one that the authorities may blame him for.
Conversely, the ending of Us leaves no question about who is responsible. While it’s equally twist-filled as Get Out — especially when it comes to Adelaide and Red and which one of the pair is a doppelgänger — the final moments of Us show the human clones forming a chain that stretches for miles. It’s a much less intimate story by the conclusion compared to Get Out or Nope, and the Wilson family are one of many who went through a similar experience. While this certainly makes the ending of Us chilling, it inspires an entirely different flavor of dread than Nope and Get Out.
How The Get Out Ending Was Received
The Ending Has Sealed Get Out As A Masterpiece
Get Out has been hailed as one of the best horror movies of all time and one of the greatest movies of the 21st century. A big part of what cements the film’s brilliance is its ending. Jordan Peele does an exceptional job of creating a gripping story and maintaining a paranoid vibe while keeping the audience in the dark for most of the movie about what was really going on. It is not until the garden party sequence at the end of the movie’s second act that it is confirmed Chris is in real danger.
The ending of the movie then has the daunting task of making all that tension and uncertainty pay with a worthwhile reveal. Peele more than succeeds as the concept of these white villains taking over the bodies of the Black victims elevates the social commentary of the movie and becomes a fascinating idea to delve into. The entire movie is layered with complex ideas, but the reveal of what the true sinister plan is makes for an appropriately unsettling and smart twist.
When it comes to the final moments of Rod arriving to save Chris, the wisdom of Peele’s understanding of what the ending needs becomes clear. While the canceled twist ending for Get Out would have been an impactful final moment to end on, Peele was right in his assessment that the audience deserved to see Chris escape the movie in victory rather than see all his struggles lead to his defeat. As a testament to this, the moment Rod arrives garnered some of the biggest reactions from the audience in theaters.
Without the ending landing the way that it did, Get Out would still have been an above-average horror movie with some memorable sequences. However, Peele doesn’t let the movie get dragged down in the final moment, but rather finds a new gear for the energy and stakes, delivering the rare horror finale that is terrifying, exciting, crowd-pleasing, and has some intelligent things to discuss once the credits roll.
