Back To Black: Jordan Peele Reveals Much Darker Ending For 'Get Out'

With Universal's Get Out currently tearing up review sites and the box office as one of the best horror films ever, it is certainly a thriller that gets under your skin and stays there. Cleverly balancing humor, horror, and the dark issue of racism, Get Out is almost too clever for its own good. The film is held up by its truly bizarre final act, but with a great pay-off that will have you thinking about #GetOut for a long time to come.

The film was never particularly cheerful, mixing graphic horror, uncomfortable racism, and Stepford Wives unease, however, director #JordanPeele reveals that the original ending has a much darker twist to the tale.

Warning: Spoilers for Get Out ahead.

Home Sweet Home

The conclusion to Get Out is a real air punch moment as Daniel Kaluuya's Chris has laid waste to the racist inhabitants of the Armitage Estate and left his treacherous girlfriend for dead in the road. Our final boy makes it to just before the the credits, only to have a police car pull up. Just when you think Chris will be apprehended by the white supremacist cops we met before, the door opens to reveal his friend Rod coming to the rescue.

Speaking to BuzzFeed podcast Another Round, Peele says that the ending was anything but set in stone and we nearly got a more classic #horror final scene. In Peele's original, it really is the cops who pull up and Chris is obviously arrested. Although it never got past the planning stages, Chris would have either spent the rest of his life in jail or have been gunned down on the spot — presumably as a social commentary on race and the police in America:

"In the beginning when I was first making this movie the idea was, ‘OK, we’re in this post-racial world, apparently.’ That was the whole idea. People were saying, ‘We’ve got Obama so racism is over, let’s not talk about it.’ That’s what the movie was meant to address. Like look, you recognize this interaction. These are all clues, if you don’t already know, that racism isn’t over. So the ending in that era was meant to say, look, ‘You think race isn’t an issue? Well at the end, we all know this is how this movie would end right here."

A Happy Ending

Where most directors would've stuck with a grim goodbye, Peele also revealed what made him go for the happy ending as opposed to the macabre choice:

"It was very clear that the ending needed to transform into something that gives us a hero, that gives us an escape, gives us a positive feeling when we leave this movie. There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing the audience go crazy when Rod shows up."

While Chris's escape doesn't set him up for a sequel, Peele has revealed that he has at least four more "social commentary" horrors about the dangerous psyche of the human race lined up. Get Out certainly didn't rely too much on the comedy element of its self-dubbed horror-comedy genre, but seeing Chris framed for murder would definitely have left a sour taste in our mouths. Get Out rightly deserves the praise it gets, featuring a perfect ending to a near-perfect film.