In 1968, George Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead shocked audiences and birthed the modern zombie flick that both horror aficionados and general audiences have come to know and love. In a less-than-subtle commentary on the persistence of racism in recently-post-Jim Crow America, Romero closed his film with a scene hauntingly reminiscent of a lynching, in which Ben, the African-American protagonist, is shot by a mob nominally patrolling the countryside to protect residents from the undead hordes. His would-be rescuers then use meat hooks to toss his body onto a pile of flaming corpses.

Jordan Peele’s directorial debut Get Out makes clear from the start that it intends to follow Romero’s lead by using the horror genre to peel back the flesh of contemporary bigotry and invite audiences to look at its bloody contours. Where he departs most significantly from Romero (besides electing to include not even one flesh-eating ghoul) is in the specific form of racism he chooses to make monstrous.

If Night of the Living Dead was about the festering, more-often-than-not open racist paranoia of the late sixties, Get Out is about the well-meaning and often grudgingly excused liberal racism of the Obama era.