Get Out (soundtrack)

Development

Before landing the job on Get Out, composer Michael Abels was working in the music department of a private school in Santa Monica, California, with no feature film experience. Director Jordan Peele discovered Abels through his YouTube piece "Urban Legends," a blend of classical, jazz, blues, and other styles, and felt the music suited the film. Abels found the script brilliant and was eager to join. Peele wanted a score that was "seriously scary" and sparse, evoking classic horror films while juggling multiple themes.

He specifically asked for African American voices in the music to represent souls lost to slavery, lynchings, and other injustices, connecting to the protagonist Chris’s ancestors and warning him of danger. Abels researched and found that the African languages of enslaved people weren't particularly musical, so he chose Swahili for its musicality. He worked with an eight-person choir chanting phrases like "run," "listen to the truth," and "save yourself," which appear during key moments as Chris grasps his predicament.

The main title, "Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga," uses voices meant to be departed slaves and lynching victims trying to reach Chris. Abels explained that Swahili lets the audience hear an African language without catching exact words, since the dead communicate through imagery and emotion. Because the story is told from Chris’s point of view, the music had to reflect that. For a garden party scene, Abels wrote a harpsichord concerto in Vivaldi’s style, his first piece for the film, but Peele rejected it and required a rewrite to match Chris’s perspective.

The score primarily uses strings, harp, and tuned percussive bowls for a classic horror feel. Brass appears only in darker scenes, and sampled libraries include an eerie sound of a violin bow on a metal bike spoke. Abels didn’t rely on a checklist of African instruments but gave the score a rhythmic pulse, making it modern. He favored live instruments over electronic ones, using strings and rattles to create an unfamiliar sound.

Reception

Music critic Jonathan Broxton of Movie Music UK found the score "refreshingly different," calling it a new approach to scoring horror movies inspired by Jordan Peele's audacious take on the genre. He noted how Abels combines African and Deep South vocals with jazz and blues influences and traditionally dissonant orchestral horror scoring. Sean Wilson of MFiles wrote that Get Out is one of the most varied, unusual and inventive horror soundtracks of recent years, fusing musical styles superbly and achieving both satire and scares. Mark Kermode of The Guardian complimented the score as "rich and deceptively complex." Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair praised Peele's musical choices and Abels' score as "spot-on," aptly setting a mood of winking dread.