Timothy Glaraton
In a tweet recently gone viral, comics creator Adam Ellis asked, “At what point do we declare Jordan Peele the best horror director of all time?” Peele himself would seemingly put that question to bed, responding that he would “not tolerate any John Carpenter slander.” However, the fact that this is even a somewhat serious topic of conversation speaks volumes to the impact that Jordan Peele has made over a relatively short period, both in the horror community and in pop culture at large. Regarding the latter, “Jordan Peele’s next plot” has already become online shorthand for any number of potentially horrifying or uncanny scenarios that Black men and women might experience in twenty-first century America.
While it’s almost impossible to think of now, there was a time when Jordan Peele was only known as a comedian, first on MadTV and then with his show Key & Peele with co-creator and friend Keegan Michael-Key. Of course, it’s true that comedy and horror work in similar, often identical ways. Both play off our expectations of what is going to happen, building up tension to where it’s almost unbearable, and finally releasing it with a bang—be it a pie in the face or a knife in the chest. Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, some of Key & Peele‘s most memorable sketches are ones that demonstrated Peele’s eye for horror. One example is a sketch about a hotel guest’s unnatural obsession with the hotel’s continental breakfast that reveals itself to be a scene straight out of The Shining. Another is the “Non-Stop Party” music video sketch in which images of non-stop partying turn into an existential nightmare. Still, this eye for horror is something that went mostly under the radar. Until, of course, Jordan Peele took the world of cinema by storm with 2017’s Get Out.
Get Out
Jordan Peele is far from the first iconic Black figure in horror. However, his films have been groundbreaking largely because they are not only directed by a Black man and feature predominately Black leads, but they’re also centered specifically around Black anxieties and fears. As Shudder’s excellent documentary Horror Noire explains, throughout most of horror history Black men and women were—with few notable exceptions—at best limited to roles that would help ensure the “important” (i.e. white) cast members survive. At worst, they were often cast as villainous, monstrous specters of white anxieties and racism.
Get Out took this history and turned it on its head. The result is one of the most uniquely unsettling films I’ve ever seen, as the film blends classic horror tropes with a set of real-life anxieties entirely unfamiliar to me. Many of Get Out‘s iconic moments of horror and unease—the opening scene of a Black man literally being kidnapped off a suburban street, the afternoon party where Chris is being put on display before he winds up quite literally on the auction block—are things that have been (or still are) sources of real-life horror for African-Americans. They are horrors that white Americans can only ever get secondhand accounts of—or, be perpetrators of. Even the film’s title is about how Black and white Americans react differently to horror situations. As Jordan Peele explained in a keynote speech, in a film like The Amityville Horror, the white family at the center of the story remained in the house despite the supernatural happenings. A Black family, on the other hand, would have been long gone at the first sign of any spookiness.
The film even manages to deconstruct multiple tropes of classic horror movies. The trope of the white savior is deconstructed not once, but twice. The film’s villains are supposedly well-meaning white liberals, the sort of people who “would have voted for Obama for a third time.” This is quite the contrast from the Two Thousand Maniacs–style redneck mob we typically see. I could talk all day about the layers found in Get Out, such as The Sunken Place evoking the darkened theaters where Black men and women could watch the screen but not see themselves represented, or Chris killing Rose’s father with a buck, a term once used to describe male slaves. Thankfully, Peele was given the credit he deserves. The film earned him the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, making Peele the first African-American to win that award. And, just last December, the Writers Guild of America named Get Out the best screenplay of the twenty-first century so far.
Us
After the success of Get Out, expectations were sky-high as people waited to see what Jordan Peele was going to do next. What we got was Us, arguably the most important film in terms of Peele’s development as a writer/director, in large part because it wasn’t simply what amounted to Get Out 2. All of Peele’s trademarks were still very much present, but the result is a film that is much darker, weirder, and more open-ended than Get Out.
More overtly referencing classic horror like The Shining, Twin Peaks, and The Twilight Zone‘s “Mirror Image”, Us follows the Wilson family as their vacation to the California coast turns into a nightmarish encounter with their evil, underground-dwelling doppelgängers. Meanwhile, the film presents us with multiple themes, including duality versus individuality, class, and the impact our actions can have on people we might never meet. At the same time, it digs into America’s tendency to try and cover up the ugly parts of its history.
There’s a lot going on in Us, and nearly every aspect of the film has some dual meaning. The social commentary isn’t always as clear as it was in Get Out, and the ending doesn’t wrap things up quite as neatly. However, the film is an even deeper dive into horror than Peele’s first film. It proved he was no one-shot wonder and that he would not be content with simply making variations on the same theme.
Nope
Finally, there’s Nope, Jordan Peele’s latest, biggest, most ambitious film yet. Nope is yet another left turn from Peele’s previous films, moving away from the human terrors of Get Out and Us into alien and sci-fi horror. It’s where Peele starts to embrace a much wider range of influences. In fact, Nope has been called Peele’s “Spielberg moment,” and it shows in the film’s much larger sense of both scale and terror.
But, Nope isn’t content to just be another alien invasion story. Instead, it takes that framework and crafts a pointed commentary about spectacle—our obsession with it, our attempts to profit off of it, and even our tendency to try and turn tragedies into spectacles to commodify them. One example of this is a pair of siblings who become obsessed with trying to capture otherworldly invaders on film for the fame and fortune it could provide. Another example is the former child actor who not only tries to draw out the UFO for a paying audience but also to monetize the traumatic deaths of several actors he worked with on an ill-fated television show. There is even a brief appearance from a TMZ reporter screaming for someone to get his camera as the UFO is about to devour him.
I don’t want to get too deep or give too much away—at the time of writing this, Nope is still in theaters (and hasn’t even made it to the UK yet)—but it’s a film that will almost certainly be analyzed and dissected for years to come. For many, it has solidified the fact that Jordan Peele is the real deal.
Conclusion
While each of Jordan Peele’s films has felt wildly different from the others, there are a few core trademarks that feel essential to each of his films: sharp social commentary, a mix of ironic humor and horror, and a distinctively African-American lens. Significantly, the unique anxieties felt by people of color—even when they’re not the primary focus—are still an essential part of any Peele film.
It’s this last quality that lends Peele’s films much of their cultural impact. These films offer a perspective on horror that had previously been largely ignored or limited to more niche entries. But, while Peele’s films might be made from an African-American perspective, they’ve found near-universal acclaim from a wide audience. Largely thanks to his track record—three well-written, well-directed, damn good horror films—Jordan Peele’s name has become practically guaranteed to get people out to the theater.
So, while the “best horror director of all time” question might have been put to rest by the man himself, one could still realistically ask a broader follow-up question: how soon can we safely say that someone is one of the best horror directors of all time? The answer, as it turns out, can be as soon as three films. At least, it can if the three films in question are Get Out, Us, and Nope. With just those three films over a roughly five-year period, Peele has established himself as one of the premier horror filmmakers of our time. More than that, he is writing a brand new chapter in horror right before our very eyes, one that is already influencing a new generation of writers and directors.
And the best part? Jordan Peele is only getting started. We have no idea what he’s going to come up with next, just that it’s almost certain to be something truly spectacular.
