Jordan Peele might be best known for his comedy, but the actor/screenwriter who starred in projects like Bob’s Burgers and Key & Peele alongside frequent collab partner Keegan Michael Key, has his eyes on a different genre. Last year, he told Playboy wanted to cross over into horror, and now it looks like he’s following through with his words.
“I’ve been spending the first half of my career focusing on comedy but my goal, in all honesty, is to write and direct horror movies,” he said, per Shadow and Act. “I have one that I’m working on with Darko Entertainment called Get Out—I don’t want to say too much about it, but it is one of the very, very few horror movies that does jump off of racial fears. That to me is a world that hasn’t been explored. Specifically, the fears of being a black man today. The fears of being any person who feels like they’re a stranger in any environment that is foreign to them. It deals with a protagonist that I don’t see in horror movies.”
I’m glad he made that distinction, because my first thought was that he’s going the Wayans brothers route, a la their Scary Movie franchise. But it’s nice to see someone tackling the genre from that perspective and making it a serious film. When I think of black people in horror, Brandy in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer comes to mind, and she’s not even the main protagonist.
Still, I’m wondering how the plot of Get Out, which just wrapped principal filming and will be his feature directorial debut, will work as a serious horror when it’s been satirized so often before in comedy. The story follows a young black man (Daniel Kaluuya), who visits the family estate of his white girlfriend (Allison Williams), and weird things start to happen. I suppose the situation alone is a horrific, if we put it in the right context. (Picture it: Mississippi in 1939.)
Since we’re light on the details, I’ll treat this as a “wait and see” sort of thing and just….well, wait and see. But more power to Peele for branching out and trying to do something different.
(via Shadow and Act, image via Screencap)
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