Auteur on Get Out (2017), written by Jordan Peele. The complete coverage report, exactly as a customer receives it.

A young Black photographer visits his white girlfriend's family estate for the weekend and slowly discovers that her seemingly liberal parents are orchestrating something far more sinister than an awkward meet-the-parents.

Jordan, first off, thank you for submitting Get Out. I read this straight through in one sitting and then went back and read it again, which is always the sign of a script that's doing something special. What you've built here is a piece of writing that operates on multiple levels simultaneously — as a straight-up horror thriller with real scares, as a social satire with a genuinely fresh point of view, and as a character piece about a protag whose deepest wound becomes the thing that defines his ability to survive. That's a hell of a hat trick, and you pull it off with confidence.

That said, what really stands out on the page is the tonal control. This is a script that opens with a Black man being kidnapped in a suburban cul-de-sac by a guy in a medieval knight's helmet while a French language tutorial plays, and then transitions into a Brooklyn romcom morning between Chris and Rose. The whiplash should be catastrophic. Instead, it plants the reader in a state of dread that never really lifts, because you've established from the opening scene that this world contains something malevolent hiding in plain sight. The Shaw family cheerfully eating dinner while Andre gets tranquillized on their lawn is one of the strongest cold opens I've read in a while.

Also, Chris as a protag is fantastic. You've built a guy whose defining trait is a specific and painful passivity: the night his mother died, he sat and watched TV. That's the wound, and the script keeps returning to it in ways that pay off structurally. Missy uses it to break him down in the hypnosis scene, which is one of the most terrifying sequences in the script because it's not physical, it's emotional. And then the final act inverts the wound entirely when Chris chooses action, chooses violence, chooses to fight instead of freeze. That through-line, from the boy who did nothing to the man who does what needs to be done, is the emotional spine of the whole spec and it's doing serious heavy lifting.

I think the villain design is also really smart. What I love is that the Armitages aren't cartoon racists. Dean would vote for Obama a third time. Missy is soft-spoken and empathetic. Rose is progressive and protective. That's the horror. You've made your antagonists people who genuinely believe they're on the right side of history, which is a much more chilling read than mustache-twirling white supremacists.

And the specific reveal that they're not trying to kill Black people, they want to become them, adds a whole other dimension to the satire. "You're in fashion, baby" is a hell of a line, and Jim Hudson's monologue is one of the best villain speeches I've read in years because it's not framed as villainous at all in his mind.

Getting into the supporting cast, Rod is a gift. Every scene he's in provides tonal release without undercutting the tension, which is one of the hardest tricks to pull off in horror. His theory that Chris is trapped in some kind of sex slave conspiracy is played for laughs but it's also, structurally, the closest anyone gets to figuring out what's actually happening. That's craft. He's not just comic relief, he's functioning as the audience's paranoid best guess, and the way you land him at the end as the cavalry that never quite arrives, showing up in the visiting room instead of the rescue, is a great subversion of the "friend rescues protag" beat we all expect.

From a commercial perspective, this thing has real teeth. The horror space right now is hungry for elevated genre work that has something to say, and Get Out slots directly into that Blumhouse/A24 sweet spot: contained locations, small cast, huge conceptual hook, low budget, and a marketing hook that writes itself. The concept is inherently pitchable in a sentence, which is gold. You've got a producible budget profile, a strong protag part that will attract talent, and a premise that will get people talking after they leave the theater. I could see this landing at Blumhouse in about ten minutes. The one commercial consideration worth flagging is that some buyers will get nervous about the racial content — not because it's gratuitous (it's absolutely not, every beat is earned), but because certain executives will worry about how to market it. That's a them problem, not a script problem, but it's worth being ready for.

So first off, on the commercial hindrances side, the biggest one to be aware of is what I mentioned at the end of the intro: certain buyers will be skittish about how explicitly the script engages with race. This isn't a craft note, it's a market reality. Some executives will read this and immediately think about backlash, whether from the right (who will accuse it of being anti-white) or from readers who don't quite understand what you're doing tonally. You want to be ready to have the conversation about tone comps, about the fact that the horror is satirical and metaphorical, and that the racial content is the whole point of the movie, not a decorative element. Also, the ending is currently understated in a way that some development execs might push back on. The maximum security prison scene is a haunting choice, and I actually think it works, but be prepared for notes suggesting a more triumphant final image. Hold your ground on that if you can.

Moving to broader craft critiques, I want to talk about Rose's turn. Right now, when Rose flips and reveals herself as complicit, it lands, but I think there's an opportunity to seed it a little more subtly earlier in the script. The car ride and the cop scene are playing as her being genuinely protective of Chris, which is great, but on a second read those beats feel a touch too on-the-nose in retrospect. She's performing the "ride or die" white girlfriend so hard that it almost tips her hand. Consider dialing back one or two of the "I'm not going to let anyone fuck with my man" moments and letting her protectiveness read as slightly more measured, so that when we look back after the reveal, it still tracks but doesn't feel like she was overplaying the role.

Next, I want to push on the middle stretch of act two, specifically the party sequence. It's doing a lot of great work — the auction is genius, the awkward conversations are perfectly calibrated cringe, and Andre/Logan's appearance is a killer beat — but it runs a little long on the page and the cumulative effect of scene after scene of white people saying weird things to Chris starts to feel repetitive rather than escalating. Consider tightening the Gordon Greene/Emily beat and the Nelson/Lisa beat by either combining them or trimming the dialogue in each. You want each conversation to feel distinctly weird in its own way, and right now a couple of them are doing the same job.

Also, the hypnosis sequence with Missy on the tea cup, while incredibly effective, is where the mythology of "The Sunken Place" gets introduced, and I think there's a small opportunity to make that concept land even harder. Right now Missy names it in the moment ("Now you are in the Sunken Place"), which is fine, but the term itself is so evocative and metaphorically rich that I wonder if you could let the imagery do more of the work before naming it. Let the audience experience the falling, the screen above, the helplessness, and then let the naming feel like a horrible confirmation rather than a piece of exposition. Minor note but worth considering.

I think, on the plotting side, the biggest structural question I have is around Jim Hudson's monologue on page 87-90. It's a beautifully written scene, and Jim as a character is fascinating, but it's also carrying a massive amount of exposition. The audience learns about the Order, the brain transplantation procedure, the Sunken Place, the reason they target Black people, and the specifics of how the operation works, all in one sitting. It works because Jim is compelling and the reveals are shocking, but you're asking a lot of a single scene. Consider whether any of this information could be seeded earlier or delivered visually rather than verbally. For instance, the "surgical scar around the top of the head" reveal on Georgina and Walter later is a great visual payoff, but it might land even harder if we glimpsed something suggestive of it earlier.

What I'd say is, the Andre/Logan seizure moment is one of the best beats in the script, and I want to flag it as an example of what's working at the highest level. The flash from Chris's phone triggering the "real" Andre to break through, screaming "GET OUT" — that's a plant and payoff of the highest order, because it seeds both the mythology (flashes disrupt the procedure) and the movie's title in a single moment of horror. Bravo on that one. It's the kind of scene that a whole marketing campaign can be built around.

Broadly, I want to talk about Jeremy for a beat. He's serving a function in the story as the muscle, the wrangler, the guy who's supposed to abduct Chris, but as a character he feels the least developed of the Armitages. Dean has his weird speeches and his medical background, Missy has the hypnosis and the empathy-turned-menace, Rose has her whole undercover routine. Jeremy is mostly just an aggressive frat-bro archetype. Consider giving him one moment of specificity, one weird detail or line that makes him feel like a full person rather than the family's designated enforcer. Even something small — a hobby, a resentment, a particular way he talks about Chris that reveals something specific about how he sees Black men — would help him land.

I also think the deer motif deserves a little more attention on the page. It's doing beautiful thematic work: the deer Chris hits on the road, Dean's "one down, a few hundred thousand to go" line, the deer in the Sunken Place hallucination, and the mounted deer head Chris uses to kill Dean at the end. That's tremendous plant and payoff work. But because it's threaded so subtly, I worry some readers will miss it on a first pass. You don't need to spell it out, but consider whether Dean's dinner-table racism about deer could be a touch more pointed, so that when Chris turns the deer into a weapon in the final act, the metaphorical satisfaction lands with maximum force.

Now, for some more granular scene notes: on page 14, the Officer Crowe encounter is doing important thematic work — establishing the everyday racism Chris navigates, setting up Rose as protective — but the beat where she demands Crowe not ID Chris feels like it's begging for a callback later that never quite comes. Consider whether this scene should either seed something specific that pays off later (like Rose's forcefulness being noted by Chris as unusual in retrospect) or be tightened so it's not carrying as much weight as it currently is.

Moving to page 26, the "Well-to-do white family; black servants" exchange between Dean and Chris is fantastic — Dean disarming his own suspicious optics by naming them out loud is a great character move and it's exactly how these people would operate. But right after, the dead sparrow beat with Walter feels slightly disconnected. The birds-flying-into-the-patio motif is one of those thematic touches that's clearly there for a reason, but I'm not sure I fully caught what it's paying off. If the birds are meant to symbolize the futility of trying to escape this place, consider making one of them a clearer beat later in the script, perhaps when Chris is planning his own escape.

On page 43, the Georgina wig moment through the camera zoom is a killer beat — one of the eeriest images in the script. But I'd suggest getting even more specific in the staging. Right now the action reads

"she stands and begins to remove her wig" which does the job, but you have a chance to make this the moment where the audience first viscerally understands that something is deeply wrong with these people. Consider whether the wig removal could be interrupted, or whether we could see a flash of the surgical scar underneath, planting the visual detail that pays off in the finale.

Moving to page 55-56, when Chris walks upstairs during the party and the guests all fall silent, listening for his footsteps — this is a phenomenal beat that I think could be even more terrifying with a small staging adjustment. Right now we're told they stop mid-conversation. Consider whether one of them could still be caught mid-word, mouth open, frozen. That level of physical specificity would push the moment from creepy to genuinely disturbing. It's a small thing but it's the kind of image that sticks with a reader.

Then getting into page 70-72, the shoebox reveal in Rose's closet is a strong sequence, but the pacing feels a hair too fast. Chris finds the box, flips through years of photos, and immediately confronts Rose. Consider extending this beat by one or two moments — let him linger on one specific photo, let the realization sink in, let us watch him understand the depth of the con before Rose enters. The scene is currently working, but there's more emotional real estate to mine here about Chris understanding not just that he's in danger, but that everything he thought was real, including this relationship, was a performance.

Finally on page 93-94, the Missy fight in the dining room is doing a lot of great physical work — the teacup, the cat, the knife, the tea pot. It's kinetic and satisfying. My only note is that the cat leaping at Chris and getting punched out of the air is a moment that might read as unintentionally comedic on the page. I know the intent is escalating chaos, but consider whether that specific beat is earning its place or whether it's a slight tonal wobble in an otherwise perfectly calibrated set piece.

Jordan, this is exceptional work. What you've built is a spec that's operating at the highest level of craft while also having something urgent and specific to say, which is a very rare combination. The character work on Chris, the villain design of the Armitages, and the mythology of the Sunken Place are all doing serious heavy lifting, and I'd focus your next pass on the middle-act pacing during the party and on layering the deer motif and Rose's early behavior for maximum payoff. I'm rooting for this one, keep pushing!