Jordan Peele’s career as one of North America’s most acclaimed horror filmmakers began just five years ago. Still, the director’s influence is felt deep in the landscape of a once-marginalized genre: a legacy further cemented by the arrival of his third film, Nope, in theaters on Friday.
Following Peele’s social thrillers Get Out (2017) and Us (2019), Nope stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as brother and sister ranchers who run a horse business for film productions in California.
According to CBC’s Ellie Glassner, it’s a genre-bending sci-fi and western.
Peele, who has made a remarkable turn from a new sketch comic (Key & Peele) to a well-known director of genre films, told The Associated Press that he knew the time was right for his latest offering.
“I feel like this is the first time anyone would ever let me or anyone else make this movie. And so I had to take advantage. I had to get as big as possible,” Peele said. “I was like, ‘Let’s go.’
The horror genre, long a reliable moneymaker at the box office, has always had something to say. But Peele’s films further exposed audiences to horror as a vehicle for sharp, biting social commentary, according to filmmakers and scholars.
The public perception of the horror genre has changed
From left, Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer and Brandon Perea appear in a scene from Nope. (Universal Pictures via The Associated Press)
In the 1970s, Canadian film critic Robin Wood described horror films as “our collective nightmares” because they expressed society’s greatest fear: that widely accepted social norms could be threatened by the appearance of a previously suppressed monster .
But Wood also admits that horror is Hollywood’s most “unworthy” genre, scorned by reviewers and derided by audiences. “People [tend] to go to horror movies either compulsively or not at all,” he wrote.
Peele, who won an Oscar in 2018 for the original screenplay of Get Out, brought industry prestige to a historically neglected genre. Among Peel’s audience is a generation of BIPOC filmmakers inspired by his narrative, which is preoccupied with the experiences of people from marginalized communities.
“I would never have thought to write or direct a piece that was so much more community-centered and voice-centered. And when I saw Get Out, it completely changed the way I thought I could tell a story before,” said Karen Lam, a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker based in Vancouver.
Lam, whose film The Curse of Willow Song is set in Vancouver’s Chinese-Canadian community, explained that she had previously been reluctant to talk about her identity in her films. But horror films from around the world have a political edge, she said.
“When you see something like zombie movies, like when you see Godzilla, it comes from post-war Japanese terror, right? So the politics were always there,” just with more reliance on subtext, she said.
Writer-director Jordan Peele arrives at the Los Angeles premiere of Nope, Monday, July 18, 2022, at the TCL Chinese Theatre. The director is one of the main drivers of the black horror renaissance, according to peers and scholars. (Jordan Strauss/Invision/Associated Press)
Both Get Out and Us made over US$250 million at the US domestic box office against production budgets of US$4.5 million and US$20 million respectively. Peele’s success demonstrated that black moviegoers increased ticket sales when they were represented by characters on screen.
According to a 2019 Movio Surveya movie marketing software firm, Us attracted an audience that was nearly 100 percent more African-American or black than the audience that went to another horror film, A Quiet Place.
Tananariv Due, an expert on black horror who teaches at UCLA, said executives took notice after the success of Get Out, opening the door for a black-led horror renaissance with films like the 2021 Candyman reboot .
Even Peele said he wasn’t sure a film like Nope would be an easy sell in the early 2010s. “I felt like five, 10 years ago, I would never have been able to sell this movie to anybody,” the director said.
WATCH | The trailer for Nope, the latest film from director Jordan Peele:
Among other things, black horror is an expansive subgenre that reclaims the black community’s place in film tradition, where they often died first or were portrayed as the monster.
“Get Out is not for black people. It’s not for black people. It expresses a black experience,” Due explained.
The scholar added that Peele, who once gave a lecture for her course, did not originally envision Get Out as a thriller about race. Rather, it was a film about social anxiety and the feeling of being alone while surrounded by others.
“I think it says a lot that even Peele himself wasn’t thinking about race initially when he conceived Get Out, because what examples would he draw on in terms of successful films in the last five years that have been on a similar journey as Get Out ?” she said.
“They just weren’t there. So he had to go deeper into his own experiences and his own truth to find that universal appeal.”
Horror hybrids more and more common
Summer has been associated with the release of major horror titles since 1975, when Steven Spielberg’s Jaws turned the ocean waters of a Cape Cod beach town into a bloodbath.
Friday the 13th was a summer slasher from the 1980s, and teenagers spent July 1999 in terror after The Blair Witch Project. Just last month, The Black Phone – starring Ethan Hawke as a sadistic kidnapper – earned US$23.3 million in its opening weekend, holding its own at a packed box office.
Meanwhile, Nope is expected to make around US$50 million in its opening weekend, industry publication Variety reported.
WATCH | Eli Glassner’s glowing review of Nope, the third horror film from Jordan Peele:
Don’t Look Up – Jordan Peele’s Nope is a sci-fi western that does not disappoint
Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer star as rancher siblings in Jordan Peele’s highly anticipated sci-fi film No.
Colin Geddes, a Toronto-based film producer and curator at Shudder, a horror streaming platform, said the genre is resilient in a way that few are.
“Horror movies have always been, shall we say, recession-proof. They’ve always been there. They have always been popular. They don’t come in and out like musicals or westerns,” Geddes said.
“But the power of horror movies is that you have a kind of controlled panic of your own. The times we live in are scary, but when you sign up to watch a movie or a horror movie, you can turn it off at any time.”
Daniel Kaluuya in a scene from Nope. (Universal Pictures via The Associated Press)
Horror lends itself to franchising — the recent Scream and Halloween reboots have done well among young moviegoers, and the 2017 adaptation of Stephen King’s It was one of the biggest movies of the year.
But it’s also a haven for original storytellers like Peele, with David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook and Ari Astaire’s Hereditary earning a respectable place in the 21st-century horror canon.
Peele, who dabbles in sci-fi and Western tropes in Nope, said he was partly inspired by Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs.
“These are filmmakers with a big vision who took flying saucers and science fiction and brought magic to the way they told these stories. I wanted to throw my hat into the ring of one of my favorite subgenres, UFO, and do it in a way that only I can,” Peele told The Associated Press.
Indeed, horror hybrids are having a moment with films like Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the Netflix series Squid Game tackling the genre without diving in head first. Several films by popular production company A24 – namely Midsommar and Lamb – mix Scandinavian folklore with horror.
But Get Out, Us and Nope is also laugh-out-loud fun, harking back to Peele’s days in the comedy world. Other upcoming comedies and horrors like Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies and JJ Perry’s Day Shift combine laughs and scares.
Due, who saw an early screening of Nope, said the film was not a comedy “by any means”.
“But there are funny moments and funny characters, real suspense, real horror, real wonder. It’s just… unlike anything Jordan Peele has done before,” she said.
“But still, when you look at it, you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s Jordan Peele.’
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