The African-American experience has often been, by any objective account, a horrific one. So it might be surprising that, in the annals of American movies, Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” is likely the first auteurist horror picture directed by an African-American man ever financed by a major Hollywood studio. The film, which shot to No. 1 at the box office, brazenly inhabits the anxieties that surround miscegenation in our still racially stratified country. The movie’s sharp scares, gallows humor, and insidious intelligence are informed by the sensibility, and insistent paranoia, that lurks within the hearts of blacks who must navigate white spaces. The film is a major achievement, a work that deserves, in its own way, to be viewed alongside Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight” as a giant leap forward for the possibilities of black cinema; “Get Out” feels like it would have been impossible five minutes ago.

Peele spent many years trying to get financing for the movie, after conceiving of the picture during the 2008 Democratic Presidential primaries, a campaign that seemingly put racial progress and feminism at odds. “It was almost like this who’s-suffered-long-enough kind of thing.” Peele quipped, in conversation with the film reporter Logan Hill, following the film’s Brooklyn première, when asked to explain finding inspiration in the contest between Clinton and Obama. “It was a very weird time, but it made me think, Yeah, we have different civil rights, which ones are more deserving?”

The intervening years, ones in which the ascension of a mixed-race President emboldened hopes, quickly dashed, that color would no longer be such a crucible in American life, have confirmed one of many underlying tensions within Peele’s film. America may have, as recently as 2008, claimed to be through with race as a country, but by 2016, race was clearly not through with us. “We were past race, guys, what happened?” Peele said jokingly to the audience, his humor deadly serious. “Race caught up.”

The film critiques the insidious racism that lurks just beneath a veneer of white liberal do-gooderism by telling the story of a young black photographer named Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), who anxiously visits the suburban family home of his Caucasian girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams). Her parents, a doctor (Bradley Whitford) who confides he “would have voted for Obama a third time if [he] could” and a hypnotist (Catherine Keener), are friendly to a fault, but something is rotten in the state of Denmark. It isn’t long after Rose’s brother, an M.M.A. enthusiast (Caleb Landry Jones), returns home during Chris’s visit that “Get Out,” which opens with a black man (Lakeith Stanfield) being choked unconscious and stuffed into a car on a suburban street by a masked assailant, makes plain its terrifying premise: the Armitage family serially kidnaps and brainwashes African-Americans into servility, ostensibly for their own good.

“The real thing at hand here is slavery,” Peele remarked as he first began to take questions from the audience. “Not to bring down the room, guys. It’s some dark shit.” And indeed, sex slavery, and the fear of it, are a very present spectre in the movie.

The next time we see Stanfield’s character, he is dressed in a dinner jacket and a tweed fedora, as a guest at the Armitage home, speaking in a tone and syntax far different from when we glimpsed him at the beginning. He is suddenly married to a white woman, another guest of the Armitages’, who is perhaps thirty years older than he is. The oddity of this is not lost on Chris, who attempts to engage the only other black man in the room in a way keeping with men of their age and culture; he wants to bro up with him. To Chris’s great confusion and dismay, he discovers that black solidarity, all hints of the cultural traits that he assumes the man must be familiar with, have been ground out of him.

Later, Chris, fearing the Armitages’ black maid has unplugged his cell phone out of animus for his dating Rose (“It’s a thing,” he says to his seemingly uncomprehending girlfriend in private), tells the maid that he gets nervous when there are only white people around. This bid for black kinship among whites brings a sullen look to the woman’s face. “No,” she says, in an odd, drawn out way, her deep tone of voice giving away to an absolutely gut-wrenching, bone-curdling laugh, the type of guffaw usually reserved for the most unhinged characters in Takashi Miike’s movies. In that instant, in what passes between them in that terrible awkwardness, the trauma of black life in America is writ large. Until now, perhaps with the exceptions of Charles Burnett’s “To Sleep With Anger” and Bill Gunn’s “Ganja and Hess,” this sort of sophistication has been lacking from black horror tales.

“Get Out” allows us to hold out hope that, at the very least, Rose is on Chris’s side. That, perhaps, when these monsters are revealed for what they are, she’ll stand in his corner, or say to her racially troubled white family, as Beau Bridges did to his in Hal Ashby’s “The Landlord” (the most radical movie concerning miscegenation in the nineteen-seventies that American cinema produced), that N.A.A.C.P. can also stand for “Niggers Ain’t Always Colored People.” Chris and Rose’s chemistry is evident; you get their shared humor from the jump, and are attuned to the way they navigate the racial divide that would attempt to keep them apart. She speaks up for him when a cop needlessly asks for his I.D. during a traffic stop, and is quick to soothe his anxieties amid all the suburban whiteness of her parents’ world. We sense that she understands what that world likely represents to him. But, at the end of the day, when the noose is lowered and tightened, Rose reveals where her true allegiances lie.

“I never thought the movie would get made,” Peele said on the phone, a few days after he premièred “Get Out” in Brooklyn. “I thought it was impossible.” Shot in Alabama because of tax credits, but set in a sort of American coastal anywhere, “Get Out” is a work in keeping with the profound racial pessimism of the age, an explosive corrective to Obama-era films like Jonathan Demme’s 2008 drama “Rachel Getting Married,” which portrayed an interracial wedding between a black man and a white woman in the idyllic Connecticut suburb of the woman’s parents as a triumph of post-racial liberal America.

It is also a meditation on a specific subgenre of American movies, the so-called social thriller, a subject that Peele talks about with wide-ranging thoughtfulness. “In a social thriller, the monster at hand is society,” Peele said. “Whether in an allegorical sense, as in ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ or in a metaphorical sense, like ‘Rosemary’s Baby.’ ‘Candyman’ explores fear of the ghetto, in that case, Cabrini-Green, in Chicago. ‘Misery’ is about fandom and the way we idolize and worship people. The beauty is that many horror movies and many thrillers do deal with society in some way, but in the social thriller, it’s society that is the villain.”

All four of those films were included in a series at BAM Cinématek that Peele curated, “The Art of the Social Thriller,” along with movies as far afield as Wes Craven’s 1991 horror film “The People Under the Stairs,” the most salient gentrification allegory American cinema produced in the nineties, and Stanley Kramer’s 1967 miscegenation drama “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” the film that “Get Out” is most actively echoing and subverting. “I wrote it before I met my wife, but there was a time when I went to a girl’s parents’ house for the first time, and I was nervous because she hadn’t told them I was black,” Peele confided, when talking about his personal experiences dating white women, a theme that has finally found its cinematic apotheosis. “That fear is a very real thing, and I haven’t seen it expressed in this genre, in modern times.” And now he’s done it.