Watch Jordan Peele Discuss Get Out‘s Chilling Alternate Ending

When viewers originally saw Get Out in theaters early this year, many were expecting the worst toward the end of the film as a car with its red and blue lights shining pulled toward Chris and Rose. While the audience was able to breathe a sigh of relief as it turned out to be Chris’ friend Rod, an alternate ending included on the Blu-Ray DVD reveals that director Jordan Peele almost took the film down a much darker path, as we reported earlier this month.

In a recent interview with Essence, Peele reveals that he originally wrote the gut-wrenching ending as to “make a hard point and not let the audience off the hook.”

In this version, instead of Chris’ friend Rod coming to his rescue, two white police officers come to the scene and immediately arrest the film’s lead character. He is then seen in prison with no hope of being able to prove himself innocent—his only source of comfort being the fact that he was able to stop the family from hurting anyone else.

It is painful to watch but unfortunately, it is much more realistic than the ending shown in theaters. The likelihood of a black man being able to kill an entirely white family without facing major repercussions is slim to none. As the film itself is a critique of the idea that we live in a “post-racial society” and was meant to play on all the different ways that racism and white supremacy manifest in this day and age, it is clear why this was Peele’s original intention for the film.

“By the time the movie was finished and ready, it was very clear that the audience needed a little bit of an escape,” he says of his reason for reshooting the last few minutes of the film.

You can grab a copy of Get Out to see the alternate ending for yourself (though it has made its way to the web). Find out where the film landed on our list of the year’s best so far here.