Get Out review – white liberal racism is terrifying bogeyman in sharp horror Read more

Jordan Peele’s Get Out is the first great paranoia movie of the Trump era, and it may be the first of many. I won’t spoil it for you but it’s primarily a horror film about a terrified black man trapped alone among possibly murderous racists, and it lands repeated bullseyes on white liberal hypocrisy. It’s also driven by an extreme paranoia that proves entirely justified. Better yet, the film is a huge hit – $30.5m and counting at the US box office – so perhaps it’s channelling the widespread sense of unease outside the multiplex doors.

What Get Out does for nervous African-Americans, upcoming Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale should do for women. And surely we will soon see Muslim and Hispanic nightmares on film as the new president’s travel bans are enforced, and as US government deportation sweeps go into full swing. This time around it will be hard for fiction or satire to outstrip reality, as it often has in paranoia classics of the past.

The best new releases to watch during Black History Month Read more

Just look at how paranoid we are now, and for what good reason: some think Americans have elected The Manchurian Candidate, some Dr Strangelove or Chance the gardener, while others want to re-enact the failed military coup from Seven Days In May to be rid of him. To be sure, the Washington Post of All The President’s Men might yet save us from Trump, as it did with Nixon, but now that people are – contra Three Days Of The Condor – rooting for the CIA against a president, these old models of paranoid art might no longer be useful.

The last time Americans felt that a clampdown was imminent was probably early 1970, the time of the Kent State shootings and the Moratorium To End The War In Vietnam. Two movies that encapsulated all the paranoia and fear of that time, Robert Kramer’s Ice and Peter Watkins’s Punishment Park, may be about to come into their own.

They are, in different ways, as deeply paranoid as Get Out. Ice is about a network of underground revolutionaries working against a totalitarian state (at war with Mexico), and the brutal attrition they suffer, while in Punishment Park, anti-war dissidents and black activists are forced to cross 50 miles of desert as marauding cops gun them down. The Trumpiest thing about Punishment Park is that the TV networks are on hand to film everything; the punishment of dissent has become entertainment, a grim foreshadowing of the post-Survivor reality TV that gave the United States of Idiocracy its new president. This time around, it seems, paranoia isn’t just for Jordan Peele and African-Americans. This time we all get a taste.

Get Out is released on Friday 17 March