In the series Hallowed Grounds, we revisit some of the greatest auteur-driven classics of modern horror history that have influenced the current crop of horror movies terrorizing audiences today.

When Get Out was released in early 2017, the social horror film felt like nothing we’d ever seen before. Borne from the systemic racism and genocidal atrocities that are woven into our nation’s history, the experience of witnessing for the first time Jordan Peele’s directorial debut was like having a dentist drill into the abscess of your decaying root canal. It inspired sensations both primal and new.

But, as with all great films, Get Out is as much informed by the rich, colorful history of cinema as it is an expectation-rewiring work of modern revisionist horror. In interviews, Peele has cited movies like The Stepford Wives, Candyman, and Night of the Living Dead as his major points of reference for Get Out. But to me, there is no classic film that captures the horror-of-human-history phenomenon more exemplarily than John Schlesinger’s 1974 thriller, Marathon Man.

Paramount Pictures

An old-fashioned pressure-cooker that usually doesn’t get mentioned when discussing the linchpins of the horror genre, Marathon Man, like Get Out, brings to life the restless spirits who died at the hands of unthinkable prejudice—but whereas Peele points the barrel of his lens at white slave owners and the still-lurking demons of racial bigotry that continue to possess our nation to this day, Schlesinger contemplates the evils of modern-day Nazism and the contemporary agents of genocide who stand complicit to, or carry forward, that swastika-emblazoned flag of antisemitism.

Both taking place in and around New York City, and centering around otherwise capable young men who are victims of historically tyrannical powers beyond their control, Marathon Man and Get Out bear so many resemblances that it’s a really a wonder (to my knowledge) no major publication has noted their uncanny resemblance. Perhaps it’s due to the director-centric culture of current indie production studios such as Blumhouse, who, like major studios during the auteur movement of the 1970s when Marathon Man was made, certainly gave Jordan Peele carte blanche with his directorial debut. But these films feel perversely sympatico.

Marathon Man exudes the sort of toxic paranoia of which '70s-era New York films have become so iconic.

Marathon Man, starring Dustin Hoffman, exudes the sort of toxic paranoia of which '70s-era New York films have become so iconic, opening with a brutal and violent automobile stand-off between two grey-haired representatives of the film’s opposing forces: the courageous Jewish citizens who are forced to carry the burden of the unthinkable trauma committed against their people, and the latter-day Nazis that continue to walk in the shadows of history’s darkest hour. Like Get Out, Marathon Man similarly orbits around a particular childhood memory that both drives all the thematic impulses of the film, and tangles the main character in the spider-web of old malice and massacres that are driving the narrative forward.

Paramount Pictures

Composed almost like a Sidney Lumet crime thriller but with a hearty dose of the sort of unforgettable villainy found only in horror films, Marathon Man sees Dustin Hoffman’s post-grad student, who is studying “the use of tyranny in American politics” for his dissertation, wrapped in a Nazi conspiracy to launder diamonds that a legendary war criminal had stolen from Jewish prisoners of WWII-era concentration camps. The villain in question, no-doubt inspired by the real-life monsters of Nazi Germany, is the ruthless dentist Christian Szell—also known as Der Weisse Engel, or “The White Angel,” a nickname he earned in Auschwitz for his stark white hair and penchant for torturing inmates through unspeakably cruel dental procedures.

Although Schlesinger veers away from anything supernatural, Szell (played by Laurence Olivier) inspires that same sort of decades-old dread that Peele imbued in his unfathomably evil white supremacists, creating for a sense of horror that creeps down your back and seizes hold of the base of your spine.

Hallowed Grounds

While there is no “sunken-place” in Marathon Man, Schlesinger continually employs the image of Hoffman sitting in a bath, naked, completely vulnerable, with a white rag draped over his face, illustrating the same sort of complete helplessness of Daniel Kaluuya’s character in Get Out, both young men seemingly viewed as blank canvases by the ancient regimes who seek to weaponize them.

Jesse Owens, the famous runner who bested Hitler in the 1936 Olympics by winning four gold medals and obliterating the myth of Aryan superiority, is a central point of reference for both Schlesinger and Peele. In Get Out, Owens’s victories were perhaps the spark plug for the evil white family’s ritualistic lobotomizing (and identity-consuming) machine, since an ancestor is said to have famously lost to Owens in the legendary Olympic Games of 1936. And thus, running becomes a major theme of interest to Peele, who included a now-iconic sequence of a black worker at the pseudo-plantation estate sprinting full force toward Kaluuya in the middle of the night halfway through the film.

Paramount Pictures

Marathon Man is a movie about a marathon runner, so of course Schlesinger is interested in the overall theme of running. But the 1974 thriller curiously dwells on film-reel footage of a particular black runner throughout the film. Frequently intercutting grainy imagery of a thinly built, lionhearted Olympic athlete who goes unnamed in the film, students of history with a keen eye for subtext can plainly see that it’s Jesse Owens, a figure who was just as important to Schlesinger as he is to Peele.

Like Get Out, Marathon Man is one of the few films of the horror/thriller catalog to be granted attention from the Academy. It gained a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Laurence Olivier, and just as the two films are sure to remember the inhuman carnage and atrocities that pock-mark our nation’s history, but have—and will—endure the test of time.

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