Justin Lubin © 2016 Universal Pictures 
 
 You need no more than a passing knowledge of horror movie tropes to immediately recognize the opening scene of writer-director Jordan Peele’s horror satire Get Out. And you need no more than a passing awareness of the past five years’ news cycle—or what it’s like to inhabit a black body in America—to immediately recognize the way in which Peele cleverly repurposes those tropes. A young black man (perennial scene-stealer Lakeith Stanfield) walks down the dimly lit sidewalk of a quiet suburban street, fumbling around on his cellphone for directions to his destination. A white car suddenly appears and begins to creep alongside him, gently playing the 1939 novelty song “Run, Rabbit, Run” by English comedy duo Flanagan and Allen. Instantly, his defenses are triggered. “Nope. Not today,” he mutters anxiously to himself, turning back the other way. “You know how they like to do motherfuckers out here.” But, not unlike the black teen whose name became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement, he can’t avoid trouble. A masked individual exits the vehicle, attacks, and drags him toward the car. 
 
 This is the essence of Get Out, which only grows more darkly relevant as the main story gets going, masterfully unfurling all of the real-life anxieties of Existing While Black while simultaneously mining that situation for all its twisted absurdity. Rising English actor Daniel Kaluuya stars as Chris, a photographer who is about to embark on a weekend trip in upstate New York to meet his white girlfriend’s family for the first time. This girlfriend, Rose, is played by Girls’ Allison Williams, whose on-screen persona as one of the foremost basic Beckys of the millennial generation has never before been put to such pitch-perfect use. And so it’s no surprise that Chris is a bit worried that she hasn’t mentioned to her parents that her boyfriend is black, or that she’s utterly oblivious to his concerns, insisting that “they are not racist.” (After all, she explains, her dad would have voted for Barack Obama a third time if he could have.) 
 
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 If you’ve seen Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, or Night of the Living Dead—all touchstones that Peele has cited as influences on his screenplay—you probably have a good idea of where things go from here. When Chris and Rose arrive, her parents’ estate is a mansion-size symbol of white affluence buried deep in the woods, while their zombielike black groundskeeper and maid seem to be possessed by the spirit of Uncle Tom. Peele puts the audience directly into Chris’ shoes as he navigates this new world that is at once utterly strange and all too familiar to him. He’s accustomed to the kind of casual racism tossed off by every white person he meets that weekend, whether it’s from Rose’s family or the prying guests that stop by for the family’s (initially) mysterious annual gathering. (“Is it true? Is it … better?” an older lady asks Rose immediately after fondling Chris’ biceps.) Yet he’s bewildered by the uncanny subservience of the only other black people he encounters. “It’s like they missed the movement,” Chris confides over the phone to his best friend Rod, a TSA agent, when he is able to slip away from the crowd. (As Rod, The Carmichael Show star Lil Rel Howery expertly serves as both comic relief and a surrogate for black audience members, warning Chris about the dangers of being around too many white people in an unfamiliar environment.) 
 
 Conspiracy Thrillers Movie Club Join Slate’s Sam Adams and leading culture critics as they watch and review some of the best conspiracy thrillers of the past decades, from The Manchurian Candidate to Get Out. 
 
 Peele also draws inspiration from Stanley Kubrick, most obviously when the man in the opening scene compares the suburban streets to “a fucking hedge maze,” but also in the hallucinatory scenes in which Chris is placed under hypnosis by Rose’s psychiatrist mother (Catherine Keener), which feature images of Chris tumbling off into space that are soundtracked by micropolyphonic chanting reminiscent of the Györgi Ligety music Kubrick used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But for all its nods to its horror forebears, Get Out, above all, wants to ensure that you walk away knowing that the black experience can still teeter on the precipice of being a nightmare, even in 2017. That even surface-level “admiration” for black culture on the part of white people can give way to insidious interactions that are, at best, a persistent annoyance black people must learn to laugh off, and, at worst, the kind of fetishization that only conceals deadlier preconceptions. 
 
 Get Slate in your inbox. ||||| Jordan Peele isn’t done winning. Over the weekend, the Key and Peele alum’s directorial debut, Get Out, officially crossed the $100 million mark, bringing its total domestic total to $111 million—a whopping sum compared to the film’s extremely modest $4.5 million budget. It’s an especially impressive feat for a first time director who cast relative unknown Daniel Kaluuya (Black Mirror) in a leading role. All those Hollywood excuses claiming that black actors can‘t carry a film to crossover box office success? They’re in the Sunken Place now. 
 
 Get Out, which Peele also wrote, is about a black man who discovers a horrifying family secret while visiting his white girlfriend’s parents for the first time. It’s a brilliant and layered meditation on both modern and historical racism, and an especially vital piece of filmmaking in this politically charged era. Peele also filled it the film with Easter eggs and references to classic horror films, inspiring fans to see the movie more than once in theaters in order to catch things they might have missed the first time. 
 
 Video: Allison Williams and Daniel Kaluuya Talk Racism . . . 
 
 Get Out’s success also makes it the fastest Blumhouse title to cross the $100 million mark, according to Deadline. The horror distributor previously fostered the Paranormal Activity franchise and recently released M. Night Shyamalan’s surprise blockbuster Split. “Most genre films drop in the second weekend by at least 60 percent,” Deadline notes—but Get Out has only suffered slight dips at the box office, indicating that it has some serious staying power. 
 
 The success bodes well for Peele’s ambitions to write and direct an entire series of social thrillers. In a recent interview with IndieWire, Peele said he has more films with similar themes in store. 
 
 “The best and scariest monsters in the world are human beings and what we are capable of especially when we get together,” he said. “I’ve been working on these premises about these different social demons, these innately human monsters that are woven into the fabric of how we think and how we interact, and each one of my movies is going to be about a different one of these social demons.” ||||| NEW YORK (AP) — There have been monster gorillas and sharp-clawed superheroes at the box office this month, but the biggest beast of them all has been Jordan Peele’s $4.5 million, race-exploding thriller “Get Out.” 
 
 In just 16 days, Peele’s low-budget self-described “social horror” film has already crossed the $100 million mark. While “Get Out,” made by Blumhouse Productions and released by Universal Pictures, doesn’t match the hefty global totals of “Logan” or “Kong: Skull Island,” few films can touch its extreme profitability — or its firm grip of the zeitgeist. 
 
 “‘Get Out’ isn’t a Redbox, VOD, iTunes movie,” Peele said recently on Twitter. “If you don’t see it with the theater energy, you’ll miss the full intended experience.” 
 
 And moviegoers have taken the advice. “Get Out” made $21.1 million in its third weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday, bringing its total to $111 million. Whereas most movies — especially horror films — drop considerably after opening weekend, “Get Out” has barely slipped. It dropped about 15 percent after its first weekend, and 25 percent after its second. 
 
 “Get Out,” which is the directorial debut of the former “Key and Peele” star, first led the box office the same weekend “Moonlight” won best picture at the Academy Awards. It also follows the spectacular success of the Oscar-nominated “Hidden Figures,” which has made more than $160 million since its No. 1 wide-release debut in early January. 
 
 For those who still cling to the old stereotype that films led by black actors are limited at the box office, 2017 is making an already difficult to defend notion downright ridiculous. And “Get Out” has done it without a big name; it stars British actor Daniel Kaluuya as an African-American photographer whose white girlfriend (Allison Williams) brings him home to meet her family (Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener). 
 
 “It’s time to put to bed the idea that movies with any kind of cast don’t perform at the box office. The only thing audiences care about is whether a movie is good or not,” says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for comScore. 
 
 The success of “Get Out,” Dergarabedian says, has been driven by its quality (at 99 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s the best-reviewed film of the year), its capacity to entertain and its ability to remain in the conversation. “You can’t just put this movie in a box,” he says. 
 
 And audiences for “Get Out” have been notably diverse, with 39 percent black, 36 percent white and 17 percent Latino on opening weekend. 
 
 In some ways, “Get Out” — where deep and violent racism is papered over by smiles and protests of liberal enlightenment — suggests the movie theater is already a different place since before Donald Trump’s presidency. Peele conceived of his movie years ago as a rebuke to the Obama-era idea of a post-racial America, but it has struck many as an unusually timely film. 
 
 “‘Get Out’ shows how the public racism of (the civil rights era) has hidden itself by burrowing like a ravenous tapeworm into the bowels of America, growing fatter each year as it feeds off good intentions and bad faith,” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote in a Hollywood Reporter column that called “Get Out” “‘Invasion of the Black Body Snatchers’ for the Trump era.” 
 
 The comedy website FunnyOrDie made even more direct parallels, re-cutting the film’s trailer to put Trump — who has defended himself as “the least racist person that you ever met” — in the father’s role and Ivanka as the daughter. It’s been watched by more than 3.6 million. 
 
 Audiences have recently been showing a hunger for films that confront race issues head-on. Raoul Peck’s Oscar-nominated James Baldwin documentary “I Am Not Your Negro” has made $5.8 million since opening last month, an exceptional result for any documentary, particularly a literary-minded one. Ava Duvernay’s Oscar-nominated documentary about the historical roots of mass incarceration, “The 13th,” has also been a hit on Netflix. 
 
 “Original” and “though-provoking” are suddenly looking like profitable qualities in a movie landscape that has been (and still is) overwhelmed with sequels, reboots and brand-name adaptations. That’s good news for indie distributors like A24 (which released “Moonlight”) and production companies like Blumhouse that are forging a more cutting-edge cinema predicated on filmmakers with singular visions. Blumhouse was also behind M. Night Shyamalan’s “Split,” which, with $135.8 million in box office, is also one of the biggest successes of 2017.) 
 
 Peele, for his part, has said “Get Out” is just the start for him. He is planning a series of films about our “social demons.” 
 
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 Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP ||||| Jordan Peele’s Get Out will become the fastest Blumhouse title to cross the $100 million mark, hitting the target in 16 days and beating Split (19 days), Paranormal Activity 3 (23 days) and Paranormal Activity (50 days). 
 
 The Universal release, which cost only an estimated $4.5M before P&A, crosses the mark tonight, and by tomorrow will have accumulated $111M. 
 
 As a horror movie, Get Out is truly an exception. Most genre films drop in the second weekend by at least 60% and are front-loaded. But Get Out continues to impress with only slight dips. Last weekend, the movie eased a jawdropping 15% for $28M (the best hold for a horror film since Dracula 2000), and this weekend Get Out is set to pull in $21M, just 24% down. In these diving Trump times, many rival distributors observe that Get Out hits a nerve with the audience, and that’s why audiences keep coming back (even though Peele, who wrote, doesn’t appear in the hysterical movie). 
 
 Get Out tells the story of Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) an African American young man who goes to meet his white girlfriend’s (Allison Williams) family (Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener) for the first time. But they’re not normal people, and Chris needs to Get Out of their house. 
 
 Peele initially moved forward with the movie when he pitched it to QC Entertainment’s Sean McKittrick. Edward H. Hamm is also a producer. 
 
 At the Sundance Film Festival where Get Out was the secret screening, Peele shared his inspirations for the film: “We had this black president and we’re living in this post-racial lie. This whole idea that we’ve passed it all. For me, and many black people out there, there’s racism. I experience it on an everyday basis. This movie was meant to reveal that there’s the monster of racism lurking underneath these seemingly innocent conversations and situations. It’s been fascinating watching the last few years develop, because now the movie is coming out in a very different America from where it began. I think it’s more important now, and far more interesting now. I respect Universal for having the f*cking balls leaning into this kind of sh*t.” 
 
 Peele produced the movie through his Monkeypaw Productions. The pic begins its overseas rollout on March 17. Get Out earned an A- CinemaScore –a very rare feat for a horror film– with critics embracing it with a 99% certified fresh Rotten Tomatoes score.
– A young black man ventures to white suburbia to meet his girlfriend's parents but soon realizes he better Get Out in the first feature film from director Jordan Peele of comedic duo Key & Peele. (He also wrote the script.) The satirical horror film with its fair share of funny moments currently has a rare 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics explain why: It takes "a promising idea—a black man's fear as he walks at night down a street in an affluent white suburb" and "delivers on that promise with explosive brilliance," writes Joe Morgenstern at the Wall Street Journal. "It's creepy, funny and scary—truly scary" and "the horrors of racism lurk in every gleefully lurid frame," adds Morgenstern, who was left wondering how Peele showed "such confident technique" in his directing debut. The main character, Chris, played by Daniel Kaluuya, comes to recognize the "uncanny subservience of the only other black people he encounters" during his weekend away in this "instant comedy-horror classic about the hilarious nightmare that is existing while black," Aisha Harris writes at Slate. She won't give too much away but says the film, with inspiration from The Stepford Wives and Night of the Living Dead, is "darkly relevant." It's just "so truly, madly, mercilessly entertaining, even when it makes you want to jump out of your skin," Chris Klimek writes at NPR. He agrees "it's rare to find a first-time director so fully in command of his tone," but he also commends a "top-to-bottom great" cast. Kaluuya is "especially magnetic, letting us see the grinding gearworks behind his eyes without speaking a word." Peele said he wanted to make a movie he'd never seen before. "Mission accomplished," writes Peter Travers at Rolling Stone. "For a first-time director, working from his own script, Peele comes up aces … juggling horror and laughs to skewer the hypocrisies of race in America," he writes. He adds Allison Williams is "dynamite," but Kaluuya "is a star in the making."