The title of Jordan Peele’s film—which begins as social satire and evolves, in this scene, into nightmarish terror—references what audiences should be shouting at Chris by now. But Peele wants viewers to see how Missy is subtly using her default power over Chris in this situation (he’s in her house, he’s dating her daughter) to make it all but impossible for him to refuse her request. She’s obviously preparing to lecture him about his vice, but what follows next is, of course, much worse.

“Do you smoke in front of my daughter?” Missy asks. “I’m gonna quit, I promise,” Chris replies, trying to cut the tension by smiling and laughing. “That’s my kid, that is my kid, you understand?” Missy replies, as the noise of her spoon scraping across her teacup slowly builds in the background. Soon, she’s asking more probing personal questions about Chris’s mother—the manner of her death (a car accident) and his memories of that day, when he was unable to help her. He starts to cry in spite of himself, betraying feelings he’d never want to reveal to a relative stranger, until he’s completely emotionally exposed. And hypnotized.

“You can’t move. You’re paralyzed,” Missy whispers in triumph. “Just like that day when you did nothing. You did nothing. Now … sink into the floor. Sink.” The image that follows is simple, surprising, and perfectly chilling. Chris slides down through the chair and into a dark void, suspended in nothingness and gazing up at a tiny screen–like view of the outside world. “Now you’re in the Sunken Place.” Missy intones. When he wakes up the next morning, Chris tries to dismiss his fall into the abyss as a bad dream to his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams).

At its most basic level, the Sunken Place represents Missy’s total control over Chris. Get Out’s early tension comes from Chris’s discomfort around Rose’s family and the odd behavior of their black “servants,” as Dean calls them; Missy’s hypnotic attack is the first open acknowledgement of the Armitages’ hostility. But the Sunken Place metaphor clearly has a broader meaning, too. It’s the beginning of the mayhem Peele then unleashes, and an image that serves as a bedrock for the rest of the story—including the film’s terrifying reveal of how the Armitages view and treat black people.

The idea of the Sunken Place immediately defined Get Out (which was a box-office sensation) and transcended it. Peele described the concept’s relevance to the African American experience today in a series of tweets not long after the movie’s February release: “We’re all in the Sunken Place … the Sunken Place means we’re marginalized. No matter how hard we scream, the system silences us.” Indeed, the film cleverly uses the horror genre to amplify America’s ingrained racism, exploring subjects such as cultural appropriation and the dark legacy of slavery via Chris’s battle of wills with Missy and Dean. The Sunken Place is so potent as a symbol that it’s already become a piece of cultural shorthand (and the centerpiece of a course taught at UCLA on the “Black Horror Aesthetic”).