“Get Out” Analysis Part One: Building and Maintaining Psychological Horror

(SPOILERS: Get Out – of course!)

In the spirit of Halloween, I’m going to do several posts analyzing some of the writing techniques that made the horror movie Get Out (written by Jordan Peele) so successful earlier this year. How successful? It made more than $175 million on a budget of less than $5 million… and that’s just the domestic box office! It also scored a stunning 99% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Perhaps more significantly, it became part of the cultural conversation due to its integration of themes of race in America.

One thing that I found interesting about Get Out was that for most of the movie, the main character, Chris, was only vaguely aware of the danger he was in. He sensed that creepy thins were happening, but mostly chalked it up to being a Black man entering a very white world. (This added thematic depth to the movie, something I will discuss in a future post.) The audience experienced the story primarily from Chris’s point of view and was thus also kept in the dark about what was truly going on until well past the halfway mark.

Yet this was a horror movie. The desire to save twists for later in the film posed a challenge for Peele: how to provide the kind of scares that the audience was expecting while believably maintaining the façade for the character that this was simply a visit to his girlfriend’s parents?

One of the first techniques the script employed was using a prologue to set the tone. We see a scene of a young Black man walking in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Soon a car starts to follow him. He tries to avoid the car, but ultimately he is jumped and abducted. This abduction connects to events later in the film, but from a plot standpoint, we don’t really need to see it. However, without this scene, the movie would seem more like a character drama for a good thirty minutes. Using a prologue establishes for the audience that this is a scary movie, and that colors how we read later unsettling events.

There are a few jump scares scattered throughout the movie to keep us on edge – some admittedly a bit cheap. One good one, though, comes about ten minutes in, when Chris and Rose are driving to her parents’ place and a deer jumps in front of the car. This event leads to an encounter with a cop that sets up the danger to Chris in this community. By associating the scare with a relevant story point, it feels integral to the film, as opposed to a cheesy gimmick.

Other moments are designed to make us feel that something sinister is going on at the house. For example, the groundskeeper running at Chris in the middle of the night, and the fact that Georgina, the maid, keeps unplugging his phone while it’s charging and starts crying inexplicably when apologizing to him about it. This sense that there is a secret conspiracy in the house is expanded in the scene when the party goes silent after Chris walks upstairs, and the scene of the strange auction.

The two creepiest moments in acts one and two come at major structural points: At the end of act one, Missy hypnotizes Chris against his will, sending him plummeting into the floor. When he wakes up, he can’t really remember this clearly – allowing the writer to have his cake and eat it too. The audience knows what Missy has done, but understands why Chris doesn’t take action. This serves the purpose of act one by locking Chris into the story – we know he can no longer leave without dealing with whatever’s been done to him.

The next big structural point is the Midpoint, and this comes when Chris tries to take a picture of the young Black man at the party. The flash does something to the man, and he tells Chris to “Get out!” Now things start moving a little more quickly. Chris decides he wants to leave the house, though that will not prove as easy as he expects. The threat finally comes into the open when he discovers the pictures of Rose with a parade of other Black men, revealing she is in on the secret plot. The danger becomes even more explicit as we move to the Act Two Turning Point – when Chris wakes up tied to the chair and a video reveals what’s in store for him. From there, things unfold more like most horror movies.

It is important to deliver on the genre promises of your stories. And it’s important that you deliver on the genre throughout the film. Peele wanted to save the real suspense and action for act three, so he had to find ways to create and build tension as he was building to that point. He walked a careful balance between keeping the psychological horror present without giving away the twists.

It’s important that most of the creepy, inexplicable moments scattered through the first two thirds of Get Out end up paying off in Act Three. They aren’t just random scares created for tone; they grow out of the story. This kind of planting and payoff is one of the strengths of the script. I’ll delve into that topic in part two of my analysis.

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Get The Three Stages of Screenwriting

"I used to always recommend that new writers read Story as their first and most important introduction to the craft of screenwriting, but from now on, I’m going to recommend The Three Stages of Screenwriting."
-LA Screenwriter Review

Some Thoughts About Tone

Tone is a tricky concept. It’s something we all sense, but when we try to define it, it can get slippery. Most screenwriters approach it on an instinctive level. But sometimes that can cause problems.

Imagine a movie that followed a gritty, violent scene with a sentimental comedic scene. It would be jarring and distancing to the audience. It might even strain suspension of disbelief. On the other hand, you don’t want to be two one-note. A relentlessly depressing or relentlessly cheerful film will become tedious and wear on the audience.

I think it’s best to stake out a tonal landscape where your story will live. This will put your audience in a specific mood, which will help you land certain elements of your story.

I divide tone into three axes: Comedic to Dramatic, Light to Dark, and Fantastic to Realistic. Each is a range. Your story will probably fall toward one end or the other of each. You can visualize them as a three dimensional graph.

(Note that it is hard to represent three dimensions with a two dimensional image. Imagine the dark/light axis extending out toward you and back away from you.)

Comedic to Dramatic

People often talk about comedy and drama as genres, but they are really more of a tonal continuum. At one end is broad, slapstick comedy. As we move toward the middle we have wittier, character based comedy. When we get onto the dramatic side of the range, we first have realistic drama and move out to melodrama on the end.

Light to Dark

This axis relates closely to the rating of your film. Is it more toward the gritty and disturbing end, or more light and fluffy? On the dark end we have graphic violence and sex, and disturbing themes. Adult popcorn movies are mostly somewhere in the middle. On the light end we have children’s films.

Fantastic to Realistic

Some films live in the real world, the world we’re familiar with. Others are in completely fantastic realms. Between these poles are films that mix some fantasy into the real world.

Let’s place some specific examples at each corner of our three dimensional graph (the size of the dot/text indicates whether it is closer (larger) or farther away (smaller) on the dark/light axis):





Not every film is going to be at these extremes. For example, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial is not exactly realistic, but not as fantastic as Star Wars. So it might be in the middle on the realism range. And Imitation Game lands somewhere between Theory of Everything and Requiem for a Dream in the darkness scale, though like those films it is dramatic and realistic.

(In fact, even these movies probably aren’t at the very corners of the graph – Theory of Everything has some darkness in it and Sweet Home Alabama is probably not all the way to the left on the comedy scale.)

As you start considering where films fall on this graph, you might notice the most popular films are not evenly distributed. Movies that fall in the dark/comedic range (whether realistic or fantastic) tend to be niche cult films. I find hits tend to be light/comedic films (whether realistic or fantastic) or dramatic/fantasy films (whether light or dark).

MPAA ratings are not assigned based on tone, of course, but the things that get a movie a more restrictive rating tend to put a movie further on the darker end of the light/dark scale. This may explain why hits tend toward the lighter – a more open rating makes it easier to market a film and allows for a broader audience.

So how do you use this information as a screenwriter? First it might help you get a sense of how commercial an idea is. Place it on the graph and then try to identify movies that would fit in a similar area. Were they hits?

Second, it can help you identify scenes that might fall wildly outside your tonal range. If you are doing a light, realistic comedy, is a huge slapstick set piece appropriate? Is a rape scene appropriate? Note that tone can be pretty flexible (check out The Apartment for a light, realistic comedy with some very dark sections). But you must handle the transitions deftly.

Also be careful to set up the proper tone at the beginning of your screenplay. Once a certain tone is established for a story, it’s difficult to get the audience (or a reader in the case of a screenplay) to accept a significant shift in the tone.

Sometimes writers will put something into the early part of the screenplay specifically to establish where the tone might go. For example, the prologue with Trinity at the beginning of the Matrix establishes there are fantastical elements to a story that might otherwise seem realistic. The creepy scene where all the kitchen cabinets open in The Sixth Sense establish both a fantastical and a darker element in a movie that will otherwise take a while to get either fantastic or dark.

Where does your story fit on these axes? How far does it drift?

How to Control Pace in a Screenplay

(SPOILERS: The Abyss, Inherent Vice)

Pace is important in movies, so it should be no surprise that it’s important in screenplays. One of the major goals of a screenplay is to give a sense of the experience of watching the final film. But it can be tough to match the pace of film with words on a page. A bit of action that might take two seconds on screen might require many words to convey, even when it’s done well. An image can convey so much information – thus the phrase “a picture is worth 1000 words.” In screenplays, we don’t get 1000 words to describe a frame.

This means we have to be very efficient in our writing. We have to pick which details we choose to describe carefully, and we have to deliver those details with as few words as possible. In the polishing stage of the script, a good writer will go through every line and cut anything that isn’t absolutely necessary.

When writing description, pick highly specific, evocative, representative details. So rather than writing:

INT. GROCERY STORE - DAY

Sam enters the grocery store. There are three cash registers, though only one is occupied. The store is small, with a dozen cluttered aisles. The canned goods are stacked several feet high on top of the shelves. The fruit is piled in pyramids. Refrigerators for dairy products and drinks line the outside walls. Fluorescent light casts a sickly glow over everything. Everything is dusty. There are cobwebs in the corners.

Write something more like:

INT. GROCERY STORE - DAY

Sam enters, eying the precarious towers of dusty soup cans and rice boxes leaning over the dim and dingy aisles.

Assuming nothing else from the former description is necessary to the story, this single sentence captures the flavor of the store without slowing the screenplay.

For dialogue, police yourself for the niceties that make up real speech but can bog down dramatic scenes. Avoid greetings, introductions, farewells and small talk. Often it is possible to simply cut into the scene later, just before the actual conflict starts, or even in the midst of the conflict.

Most of our concern with pace in screenwriting is about speeding things up, keeping the story moving. But there are times when you want to slow things down. Sometimes you want to draw the action out to build anticipation.

For example, it is common to slow the pace in suspense scenes. Suspense is about building tension in the audience. The “building” aspect is important. You can’t take your reader from relaxed to tense in a few sentences. Think about how horror movies do this – the long takes of a character entering a darkened basement, creeping ever so slowly forward. The writer wants to capture that feeling on the page.

One of my favorite suspense scenes is from The Abyss (written by James Cameron). Two characters are trapped in a disabled mini-sub with a leak. But the scene doesn’t start with the characters in a panic, worried about how they’ll survive. Instead, they think the problem’s solvable and begin talking about other things. Then slowly, as the water rises and help doesn’t come, they begin to get concerned. They try to find a way to fix the leak, but are stymied. Now the water is up to their chests. Tension is at its height – for both the characters and the audience. But only because the scene has taken its time to let that tension build.

There are other situations where you might want to purposefully build anticipation. There’s a scene in Inherent Vice (screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson) that is incredibly erotic. But it doesn’t throw graphic, acrobatic, shocking sex at the audience. Instead, it controls pace to build sexual tension.

In the scene, Shasta is visiting Doc (her ex-boyfriend and the main character). She enters the room naked, startling Doc. Then she sits near him on the couch and describes, in a long monologue, why she became the mistress of a wealthy and powerful developer, and how being in that position was a turn on. As she’s talking, she slowly works a foot up Doc’s leg, until it reaches his crotch at the very end of her story. She lies across his lap, and finally Doc can take it no more – he must have her. The eroticism of the scene comes from that long, slow build of anticipation for Doc and for the audience.

Of course, you can’t do this with every scene or your story will feel like it’s plodding along at a snail’s pace. You have to pick and choose when you slow things down. And you don’t want to slow a scene down with boring, mundane dialogue or business. Shasta’s monologue in Inherent Vice is interesting and revealing and sets the tone of sensuality for the scene. The discussion on the mini-sub in The Abyss is about important story issues and what’s at stake for the characters.

Though a screenplay is not a final product – it’s a blueprint for the movie, which is the final product – it is still important for the screenwriter to be aware of how the words play on the page. Not only do you want to set the tone, you also often have to convince someone to make the film! That means a good reading experience that captures the feeling of watching the movie.

You can affect the pace and the perception of pace in the way you write your action and description. Consider these two versions of a hypothetical scene:

Version 1:

INT. HALLWAY – NIGHT

Sam descends the wooden stairs – CREAK, CREAK – arriving in a long hallway. A single bare light bulb flickers on the ceiling. At the far end is a door, smudged with handprints.

Sam studies that door. Readjusts his grip on his gun.

He creeps down the hall, eyes on the door. Feeling his way along, trying not to make a sound.

Sweat drips into his eyes. He pauses, wipes it away with the back of his hand.

He hears a CREAK – spins back toward the stairs. Nothing there. His imagination?

Sam turns back, refocuses on that door. Resumes moving toward it. Quiet. Cautious. Ready.

He reaches the door. Grips the knob. Steels himself.

He eases the door open...

On the other side is Mandy, tied to a chair, gagged, mascara streaks running down her cheeks.

And behind her is Joan… with a pistol pressed against Mandy’s temple.

Version 2:

INT. HALLWAY – NIGHT

Sam descends the stairs, reaches a hallway. At the far end, a door, smudged with handprints. A single bulb flickers.

Sam stalks toward the door, gun ready. Wipes sweat from his eyes.

He yanks the door open–

And finds Mandy – tied to a chair. Joan behind her–

With a gun pressed to Mandy’s temple.


Which is better? It depends on what the purpose of the scene is. The first builds tension, the second is more active and exciting. The second is also shorter and will occupy less of the total length of the screenplay. The point is, you have the power to control the pace of the scene with your writing style. Use it.

Conceptual Decisions in Elf

(Spoilers: Elf)

In the spirit of the season, I’ve decided to spend a few posts analyzing Elf (written by David Berenbaum).

Normally when I – or most other screenwriter guru types – analyze a movie, we start by diving right into the structure. However, lately several of my students have been struggling with structuring their screenplays because they haven’t really figured out the bigger conceptual ideas.

It’s really hard to know what the story structure should be until you know what the story is really about. How do you make the decisions as to what the Act One Turning Point or Midpoint are? Too often we begin the discussion of how-to-write assuming that the writer has a fully fleshed out story concept. But seldom do stories just spring to mind fully formed.

So I want to start by looking at some of the big conceptual decisions Mr. Berenbaum made. Of course I have no idea how he went about his idea development process. But even if we can’t say exactly how he made his conceptual choices, identifying those choices will demonstrate the kind of things you need to figure out in your story before you can properly break the structure.

Let’s start with the logline: Elf is the story of a human raised as an elf in Santa’s workshop who goes to New York to seek his biological father. That’s the high concept idea, the thing that sells the movie. And it suggests a lot – it gives us a good sense of the character’s external journey and a hint at where the internal journey may lie.

Again, I don’t know how Mr. Berenbaum developed the story. Perhaps he first had the idea of an elf in the city. Or a human raised by elves. Or maybe the whole premise came to him all at once. Regardless, it’s important to note that there are actually two big ideas here: 1) a human raised by elves, and 2) that character searching for his father. I find that most really good concepts are actually two big ideas put together.

Here’s an interesting thought experiment: What if the story was simply about a human raised by elves – if it left out the part about going to New York. Imagine what that movie might be. Can you imagine a good version? Did you have to add a different second idea?

Let’s consider what underlying concepts Elf’s logline suggests. First, it’s a fish-out-of-water-story times two. We have a human who is out of place in the elf world, and then an elf who is out of place in the human world.

Second, it’s about family. Buddy (the human/elf in question) is looking for his father. This dovetails nicely with the fish-out-of-water idea. Buddy doesn’t feel like he belongs at the North Pole, so he’s seeking out his human family. And, given our fish-out-of-water angle, he shouldn’t fit in well there, either.

Third, this is a Christmas story, so it ought to take advantage of the mythology of Christmas.

Now may be a good time to bring up genre, tone and rating. There are several ways one could take this concept. It could have been done as a raunchy, R-rated, anti-Christmas comedy (like Bad Santa). Or it could have been done as a G-rated, sentimental children’s adventure (like the Rudolph TV special). It might have even worked as a straight-up romantic comedy, but that would be fighting the concept. The filmmakers of Elf chose to do a PG-13 all-audience broad comedy.

So that decision influenced how they addressed the underlying conceptual elements. The fish-out-of-water element obviously has great potential for humor, and based on the tone/genre/rating choice, that humor ought to be broad, goofy and largely inoffensive. In terms of the family element, the tone would suggest a happy ending where Buddy finds a family. And in terms of the Christmas element, we would expect a positive angle celebrating Christmas as a time of love, joy, optimism and hope.

And sure enough the movie delivers exactly those things, achieving a tonal and thematic consistency. Now the structure should start to grow organically out of these conceptual decisions. I’ll look at how that happens in my next post.

Note that these conceptual decisions are the ones I encouraged writers to make in my post titled, “What Kind of Movie Is It?”

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Slice of Life

(SPOILERS: Elephant)

I’ve recently been having a debate with a fellow writer over the merits of The Tree of Life (written by Terrence Malick). (I’m of the opinion that it’s a bunch of trite nonsense dressed up in pretention.) During the course of this rousing debate, the topic of realism came up.

Leaving aside the hot button The Tree of Life, I’d like to muse a little bit on realism. Personally, I do not see the capturing of realism on film to be a particularly valuable goal in and of itself. I see reality every minute of every day. I don’t need to pay to see it in a theater. That is, unless it’s a reality that I don’t see every day and that is inherently interesting – the kind of reality captured in movies like The Kite Runner (screenplay by David Benioff), Paradise Now (written by Hany Abu-Assad and Bero Beyer) or City of God (screenplay by Braulio Mantovani).

Except none of those movies are simply about capturing reality. They are realistic, but they have strong stories as well. They are not simply “slice of life” movies.

Margot at the Wedding (written by Noah Baumbach) was a slice of life movie. It had interesting characters who felt extremely real, and a situation rife with conflict… but then nothing very significant happened. By the end (which was more of a stopping point than an ending) I was both bored and frustrated. Where was the story?

On the other hand there's The Visitor (written by Thomas McCarthy). It too has a sense of verisimilitude and is set in a world I know, but it tells a gripping story. And here the realism heightens the impact of the story. The movie is about powerful societal forces that can disrupt lives – lives of people like those we know.

Which brings me to Elephant (written by Gus Van Sant). I have pondered Elephant a lot. The movie is pretty clearly “inspired by” the events of the Columbine school shooting. For the first half of the movie, we watch the intersecting lives of a group of teenagers at school. And these are very realistic teenagers – they’re insipid and banal. Watching their mundane lives play out is dull indeed.

And because of that, when the shooting starts halfway through, it creates some of the most horrific moments I’ve ever seen on screen. Because it feels like real kids are dying, not some pithy characters.

But I wonder about that first hour. I saw Elephant at a film festival. I was pretty much in for the whole screening no matter how bad it was. And I was bored stiff in the first half. Would I have stuck it out if it was on DVD? The boring beginning was necessary to create the power of the ending, but it was still boring. So was that good filmmaking?

Truth is not the same as verisimilitude, of course. Often genres like comedy or science fiction allows us to discuss bigger, more profound themes because they can do it in an allegorical way. And The Tree of Life is only partly a slice of life film, for that matter. It also includes sections with some pretty surreal imagery.

Ultimately there’s a sliding scale of realism in film – on one end we have a movie like Elephant, on the other movies like Star Wars (written by George Lucas). I don’t think any section of that scale is necessarily better or worse than any other. And that means that capturing reality does not excuse you from telling an interesting and compelling story.