Nightmare Fuel / Get Out (2017)

• The film absolutely delivers on this front. Non-consensual brain surgery, complete with graphic visuals of the top of someone's skull coming off, A Clockwork Orange-style forced indoctrination, whatever is wrong with Jeremy, and a high-concentration dose of And I Must Scream once you realize what's been done to the Armitage family's servants.
• Andre being abducted in the opening scene. The music being played during this does not help.
• During Chris' first night at the Armitages, he decides to go out for a smoke. For a split second, Georgina appears in the kitchen behind Chris, creeping after him, complete with a Scare Chord. Nothing comes out of it though, as Georgina is just admiring her reflection in the glass.
• A simple yet very effective scene using Primal Fear to the fullest. In the garden at night, the camera takes Chris' point of view as he sees someone running at him with seemingly no intention of slowing down. The audience will naturally fear the figure as an expected aggressor, but it's only Walter out sprinting and running past Chris.
• On first viewing, before we know the reveal, Walter's creepy conversation with Chris, especially when he talks about Rose.
• What happens to Chris under hypnosis — plunged into a featureless void called the Sunken Place, forced to helplessly watch what's happening to his physical body as if he's seeing it through a tiny television screen, as his consciousness sinks deeper and deeper into darkness. And when somebody else closes his eyelids... lights out.
  • The music that plays while he plunges into the darkness — a series of long, dissonant violin notes — makes the scene worse.
  • The hypnosis scenes also make a really scary sound out of a spoon hitting a teacup.
• After his encounter with Jim, Chris heads upstairs while guests from the "get together" chat downstairs. As soon as he's gone, all the guests immediately stop talking, look up at the ceiling, and listen to his footsteps. It's brief, but really unsettling.
• Georgina. Even before learning what's really going on with her, she's just always staring and smiling unnervingly whenever she goes near Chris.
  • At one point, Chris spots Georgina through a second-story window, preening dreamily in a mirror. He zooms in on her with his camera to get a better look... only to have her turn and stare directly at him.
  • The part where Chris accidentally runs her over with Jeremy's car while escaping from the Armitage house. Still overcome with guilt from his mother's death (dredged up by Missy's hypnosis), he carries Georgina's body into the passenger seat and keeps driving. Unfortunately for Chris, she regains consciousnesses alongside him, and with a cry of "You ruined my house!", causes the car to crash (which results in her death).
  • The scene where she appears to be Fighting from the Inside can be very unnerving when you don't yet know what's going on. Even with context it can be unsettling.
• There's something indeterminately and yet deeply wrong about Rose's brother Jeremy, played by the already creepy-looking Caleb Landry Jones (Antiviral) with a wispy little mustache. He's got a weird demeanor right from the get-go, expresses disturbing enthusiasm for violent sports, and always seems to be manhandling something, like a lacrosse stick, or a ukulele... or a fireplace poker. It's strongly implied he was the masked abductor from the pre-credits sequence, and his enthusiasm for brutal violence far exceeds even the rest of his family.
  • The fact that Jeremy is Dean's accomplice for the neurosurgery process. Aside from possibly mirroring how Dean was raised by his own father, the prospect of such a violent, psychotic person like Jeremy eventually gaining the knowledge to conduct unethical surgery on innocent people is horrifying.
  • His Villainous Breakdown of sorts in the climax is pretty unnerving, too. When he ambushes Chris at the front door, Jeremy repeatedly curses at him in a husky, deranged voice. Then he begins whispering "One Mississippi... two Mississippi... three Mississippi..." while Chris struggles in his headlock. It's pretty much the pinnacle of Jeremy's increasingly erratic behavior, and makes it all the more satisfying when Chris brutally stomps on his head.
• Chris's girlfriend Rose is endearing enough at first that The Reveal that their relationship was all an act to trap Chris in the house and her true personality are legitimately disturbing. Everything Chris did to protect her, including telling her about his fears and suspicions, was immediately reported back to her dad and used to ensnare him deeper.
  • The fact that Rose is The Sociopath, pure and simple; she has four of the five qualities described on the main page. She doesn't hate, love, or even want Chris. She doesn't feel anything for him at all, or any of her previous victims, and she doesn't care when he kills three of her family members. It's made abundantly clear after the reveal that Rose's persona as a sweet girl is 100% a front. Her acting as the perfect girlfriend is just a means to an end, and none of her interests are real. Her effortless gaslighting of Chris is also horrifying to watch, considering what he's going through.
  • The idea that Chris had been with Rose for 5 months, genuinely loved her enough to meet her parents, and had no idea that she was leading him into a trap that entire time is batshit terrifying.
  • When Rod calls Chris's number and Rose answers. There's a legitimately creepy Wham Shot of her on the other end with an emotionless face, even as her voice sounds legitimately emotional. She's almost robot-like.
  • Seeing Rose chasing Chris with a hunting rifle with murderous intent is rather intense.
  • While Chris is choking Rose after she was shot, her face changes from panic to a disturbing smile as it becomes clear that she's getting off on it.
  • The fact that Rose doesn't really seem to be that bothered by her entire family being killed is rather disturbing. She seems more annoyed than anything, like someone else broke her toys. One gets the impression that even if her family had a different occupation, she still would've been evil.
• Andre is called 'Logan' by all individuals other than Chris and Rod. Given Walter and Georgina's being possessed by the Armitage grandparents, we more than likely don't know Walter or Georgina's actual names. Speaking of Andre; "Walter and Georgina" or at least the two individuals who got possessed by them, at least got to pass on and get released from their nightmare. Andre is forever trapped in his And I Must Scream situation. And with the Armitage house being burnt down and all evidence related to it along with it, the only way it seems he’ll be free is when his body eventually dies from old age, which is at least 60 or 70 more years of being a prisoner in his own body.
• Dean's rant about deer — after Rose strikes a deer with her car, damaging her vehicle and rattling Chris, he could be forgiven for being frustrated with the very real problem of wildlife encroaching into the suburbs, but all the words that come out of his mouth are pure Does This Remind You of Anything? for the rhetoric around ethnic cleansing. (There's too many of them, they're overrunning us, the only good deer is a dead deer, if he had his way he'd kill them all...) Since taken superficially Dean and Missy are borderline Hippie Parents, it's an incredibly disturbing display of his own blind spot. Or not.
  • Later on, when the Armitage family turns on Chris, Dean asks him about his purpose in life. He just stares into the fireplace — the flames reflecting off his glasses — whilst delivering a creepy spiel about the purpose of fire.
  Dean: Fire. It's a reflection of our own mortality: we're born, we breathe, and we die. Even the sun will die someday. But we are divine. We are the gods trapped in cocoons.
• Just because Chris escaped doesn't mean that he's free. He's the lone survivor of a major fire that killed several wealthy white people. If the police get involved (and it's likely that the wealthy socialites who did "business" with the Armitages will make sure of that — Chris is a loose end who can blow the whole thing wide open), he's going to look VERY suspicious. And any chance that people would believe his crazy "brainwashing and kidnapping black people" story literally went up in flames. And even if Chris isn't blamed for the murders, Walter could possibly be blamed for it considering he shot Rose and then himself (and an argument could be made that Chris defended himself from Walter).
  • Never mind the ordeal of proving his case to the authorities and avoiding reprisals from the other auctioneers. Chris was imprisoned against his will, betrayed by the one person he cared about the most, forced to gruesomely kill three people (and witness a suicide), accidentally killed someone else in a manner very reminiscent of his own mother’s death and had his mind tampered with. Any one of these events could have long-reaching mental repercussions. All five, in less than a week? He'll need years of therapy to recover, and that's if Missy hasn't given him a phobia of therapy.
• It's extremely subtle, but everything Chris tells Rose prior to their actual escape plan, she relays in some way to her parents, not seeming to realize why Chris might not want her to. She's always trying to intervene for him, not realizing that the last thing he wants to do is rock the boat, and she can't seem to keep her mouth shut. It's a small thing, but it makes her frighteningly untrustworthy even if her intentions are good. Post-reveal, however, it's very clear that her intentions are the exact opposite of good and she's been feeding her parents information on Chris since their relationship began. The one person you think you can trust the most can't be trusted.
• How many people were abducted, experimented on, and killed to perfect the surgery method? It's likely not something Grandpa Armitage would've used on himself, his wife, or his peers until it was guaranteed to work. And since it requires two people every time, that adds up to a lot of victims.
• The hypnotic theme music played in the opening and closing credits.
  • The theme used as Dean prepares to carry out the Coagula procedure. The Ominous Latin Chanting is truly terrifying, and drives home the idea that the Order of Coagula is not just a group of immortality-seeking Mad Scientists, but effectively a cult.
  • Hell, the "Run Rabbit Run" song that plays in the opening is disturbing when you listen to the lyrics talk about a farmer hunting down a rabbit.
  • "Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run. Don't give the farmer his fun, fun, fun."
• A rare heroic example: Chris's final assault against the Armitages is rather grisly, but the fact that he does so with a rather chillingly calm demeanor comes off as quite unnerving. His stoic, yet determined face as he runs Dean through with a stuffed deer head's antlers can almost make you forget he's the hero of the story. It's an ironic twist after the family's Lack of Empathy post-reveal with the horrors they have forced upon him. Quite the extreme example of Beware the Nice Ones.
  • Special mention goes out to him taking out Missy. After he breaks the teacup, she tries to stab him with a letter-opener and he blocks it with his hand. Look at him while she's trying to stab him. He closes his eyes and mumbles, "Yeah", before turning the tables on her and stabbing her in the eye off-screen.
  • Or how he brutally finishes off Jeremy, stomping on his head multiple times after Jeremy has stopped moving. Makes one wonder if it was a Double Tap or Chris was indulging in his revenge.
• Unless he died on the operating table, Jim is going to awaken with half his skull and scalp removed with the basement and the entire Armitage household burning around him before he himself burns to death. Although he was questionable with his motives, whether he deserves it or not is subjective with the viewer. Though he probably died from blood loss before that.
• One alternate ending that wasn't included in the film had Rod breaking into the Armitage estate and managing to find Chris only for Chris to assure him he has no idea what he's talking about...
  • Another alternate ending has Chris successfully choking Rose to death...right as two cops arrive (instead of Rod) and arrest him. Both terrifying and heartbreaking, especially when he's talking to Rod in prison. And the fact that this was going to be the original ending was just more disturbing. Fortunately, test screenings gave Peele a change of mind about the ending.
• When the Armitage family starts to turn on him, Chris, who was initially panicking when telling Rose to find the keys, starts screaming at her instead. It's kinda terrifying and jarring considering that up until this point he was a rather calm and pleasant guy, but it just shows how terrified he was at that point.
  • To top it off, halfway through the scene Rose lets the facade of caring and desperately looking for keys fade away, looking back at Chris with an almost emotionless stare.
  Rose: You know I can't give you the keys, right babe?

---