In ENG 1230: The Social Thriller, Assistant Professor of English Dan Burns explores the deeper social commentary behind some notable genre films.
Viewers of Jordan Peele’s Academy Award-winning film “Get Out” may think they’re in for a straightforward psychological thriller. But beneath Peele’s use of suspense and unease (and some humor) lies a deeper social message about society, class and race. It’s this film, and its message, that encouraged Assistant Professor of English Dan Burns to develop his literature and cinema & television arts crossover course, ENG 1230: The Social Thriller.
“The public response to ‘Get Out’ was such a powerful example of the timely cultural work popular cinema can do,” Burns says, “and I was particularly struck by Peele’s playfully allusive style.”
Noting the writer-director’s tendency to wear his influences on his sleeve, including Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and other ambitious 20th-century directors, Burns also designed the course to expose students to an earlier chapter in film history.
“This ‘throwback feel’ associated with Peele’s style rewards student participation — an opportunity to make connections and share those discoveries with their fellow viewers,” Burns says.
Through this course, students explore the genre’s rhetorical and discursive power in suspense-driven allegories on diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging and social justice. The hybrid nature of the course is one of the core elements of the new global film & cultures minor, which Burns coordinates with Kai Swanson, assistant professor of cinema & television arts.
“The minor’s curricular goals are primarily collaborative and organizational: to help students identify film studies courses that are already in place across the university curriculum and provide a framework for organizing them,” Burns explains, “whether it’s a Film, Politics & Society course offered by the Department of Political Science & Public Policy or one in Italian Cinema taken through the World Languages & Cultures program.”
Social thrillers like “Get Out” handle complex societal issues masked through film genre conventions. In the 1950s, “social message” or “problem pictures” looked at different subjects through the context of melodrama. In the 1960s, the movie industry began to deal with those issues more explicitly in films such as “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “Night of the Living Dead” and “Rosemary’s Baby.” More modern variants on the genre include “Parasite,” “Promising Young Woman” and the body-horror film “The Substance.”
“In shaping its definition, students compare social thrillers to other, related genres in order to better understand how films like Peele’s separate themselves out through implicit allegorical messaging rather than direct polemic,” Burns says. “In this way, students have a lot of fun defining what the social thriller is — its coherence as a genre — or whether there might be a better way to think about these films.”
The course was taught for the first time during an Elon Winter Term, and the regular semester version has enabled further expansion.
About the Professor
Dan Burns is an assistant professor of English whose teaching and research focus on film and media studies, adaptation, the history and theory of the novel, and U.S. literature and culture. He holds a doctorate from UNC-Greensboro and is active in interdisciplinary scholarship and academic leadership, including co-coordinating the global film & cultures minor.
Recommended Materials
- “Get Out: The Annotated Screenplay” by Jordan Peele
- “Rosemary’s Baby” by Ira Levin
- “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead