The opening scene of “Get Out,” a satirical horror-thriller perfectly tailored to our post-postracial moment, is so cleverly composed and effortlessly subversive that writer-director Jordan Peele never quite manages to top it. Filmed in a single take with an elegantly swiveling camera, it shows a young black man (Lakeith Stanfield) walking through an affluent neighborhood at night, nervously reassuring himself and trying not to freak out when he realizes he’s being followed.

The scene is a jolting piece of suspense craftsmanship and a clever dismantling of several decades’ worth of racist stereotypes: The black guy walking alone on a dark street, so routinely depicted as a figure of fear, menace and criminality, is here recast as a frightened, vulnerable innocent. It’s not the first such inversion; it’s been almost half a century since George Romero cast Duane Jones as the hero in “Night of the Living Dead,” though few genre filmmakers have been quite as willing to throw down that particular gauntlet in the decades since.