Jordan Peele’s directorial debut, Get Out, is the story of a black man who visits the family of his white girlfriend and begins to suspect they’re either a little racist or plotting to annihilate him. Peele examined race for laughs on the Emmy-winning series Key & Peele. But Get Out expresses racial tension in a way we’ve never seen before: as the monster in a horror flick. GQ talked to Peele in his editing studio about using race as fodder for a popcorn thriller and just how evil you can make the white people.

GQ: You started working on this movie before Barack Obama was even in office. It’s hitting theaters at a time when the belligerent host of NBC’s The Apprentice (seasons 1-14) is the President of the United States of America. Two weeks into office, he’s basically running the country like it’s sweeps week, and anything goes. Do you think the movie will resonate differently now than it would have a year ago? Or even a month ago?

Jordan Peele: I think Get Out will resonate differently in Trump's America than it would've if it came out in Obama's America. I really don't know how though. That's the hard thing about a "social thriller". You put in years to make a film, and society is a moving target. More interesting to me is to feel a part of this renaissance of untapped voices that's happening in the entertainment industry right now. With what Donald [Glover] is doing on Atlanta, what Issa [Rae] is doing with Insecure, and what [director and writer] Ava [DuVernay] is doing with everything... It feels like we can get shit made now, that we never could've before.

You’ve said Get Out is inspired by Rosemary’s Baby and the original Stepford Wives, which both use gender as fodder for scares. Why do you think there are no horror movies about race?

Black creators have not been given a platform, and the African-American experience can only be dealt with by an African-American. That might be problematic to say. And now that I think about it, [The Stepford Wives author] Ira Levin is a man, and he and Roman Polanski wrote Rosemary’s Baby. Let’s say it would be scary for a white writer and director to do something that includes the victimization of black people in this way. Of course, we have this trope where the black guy is the first to die in every horror movie—that’s a way for [white filmmakers] to have their cake and eat it, too.

I was trying to think of horror movies where the black guy did not die first. I came up with two: Deep Blue Sea, with LL Cool J.

Yep.

And House on Haunted Hill, Taye Diggs.

That’s a remake. I have not seen that.

I don’t know that I recommend it.

[laughs] Great. Another big piece of the puzzle is black leads in film—especially in a genre film, which are seen as being in the moneymaking category—have been looked at as a monetary impossibility for a long time. [But then] you have a movie like Straight Outta Compton doing the worldwide business it did, and I think it opened up the door and told people that [a black lead] doesn’t have to be thought of as a risk. One of the things that this film is about—stepping back from the content—is telling a story with a black protagonist.