He’d wanted to for a long time, for no reason other than a deep
love of Stanley Kubrick’sThe Shining, but this was a particularly
covert cosplay: while promoting his second featureUs, he arrived
for a filmed interview seemingly incognito in a plaid shirt and red
corduroy jacket. One eagle-eyedThe Shininggeek spotted the
reference, though, duly screen-grabbing it and tweeting it to the
movie masses. “All work and no play,” responded Peele, ’fessing up.
“It was just a fun thing,” he says now. “I honestly didn’t expect
anyone to pick up on it, but it was cool that they did. But I would
have done that years before I was a filmmaker and doing press. The
Easter egg life is a way of life.” He laughs. But he’s not joking.
It’s 1pm in Los Angeles, and Peele is lunching atcasa
Monkeypaw, his production company nestled in the Hollywood
Hills, taking a break from “shifting between several writing
projects” to talk toEmpire. This house is full of Easter eggs: the
armchair that lowers the hero ofGet Outinto the Sunken Place
lives here, as does Rose’s frankly evil little bag from the same film,
while the walls featureGet Outfan art alongside official posters.
Peele’s movies are likewise full of hidden hints and clues. The
two he has made so far practically beg to be watched multiple times,
in multiple ways. They boast layers upon layers
upon layers, so you can drill down through the
pure entertainment of it all, into incisive social
commentary. He also, of course, pays tribute to
all that came before.The Silence Of The Lambs,
Halloweenand Hitchcock inspiredGet Out, and
are all homaged within, while the film is littered
with subtleThe Shiningreferences, as well as nods
toJawsandChristine. Such shenanigans also
abound inUs, which begins in 1986 on the same
Santa Cruz boardwalk on which 1987’sThe Lost
Boyswas filmed. “You know, they’re shooting
a movie over there by the carousel,” says one
character. Peele is massively meta. He’s always
bled genre. Now, as Hollywood’s new horror
master, he’s bathing in it.
•••
PEELE CALLS MONKEYPAW “a little bit of
an escape from the rest of LA”, a “creative haven”
in which he can work. That said, it’s bigger than it
used be. Back when it producedGet Out, he says,
“It was a company of just one.” There are 11 on
the team now. His empire is growing quickly.
Peele’s directorial debut smashed barriers
across the board. Producer Sean McKittrick
took it on at the draft-script stage because, he
later said, he’d “never seen that movie before”.
Nobody had. A thriller about wealthy white
people harvesting black bodies, it was horrific and
hilarious, and had a profound effect on audiences.
Some had never before felt so keenly represented;
others were suddenly faced with some self-
reckoning, such was Peele’s portrayal of everyday
microaggressions. His follow-up, last year’s doppelgänger monster
movieUs, was just as bold and unique. And both were shots in the
arm for horror, Peele providing the shock of the new twice,
refreshing a genre that’s fuelled him from the start.
He’s had “a lifelong relationship” with it, he says, explaining
his “declaration and commitment to horror” — he’s not about to
make a knockabout comedy. “It began as a troubled relationship.
I have a vivid imagination, as you can probably tell. And horror
movies, when done right, use the audience’s imagination against
them. You hear the phrase ‘less is more’ in horror, what you don’t
show is the scariest thing, and I believe that’s true. I was plagued
with nightmares, and waking nightmares, when I was a child, based
sometimes on pieces or images from horror movies that I’d see.”
Raised in Manhattan, Peele was afraid of the dark and the
unknown, and was soon drawn towards things that heightened his
fears. A friend was allowed to rent whichever movies he wanted,
and with him “morbid curiosity” compelled Peele to soak up
horrors such asA Nightmare On Elm StreetandThe Shining, even
though they terrified him to the point of sleeplessness. “My mother
would say, ‘Why do that to yourself? Don’t watch these movies.’
That push and pull between the fascination with the darkness and
then also just being haunted and tortured by it was very profound.”
By the time he was 12, he says, “something had to give”. He
realised that if this stuff was affecting him so deeply, it must be
incredible artistic work. He was always creative: he drew pictures
constantly, and was “big into story creation, character creation”.
Then one night on a school trip with his friends, the 13-year-old
Peele told a ghost story around the camp fire, spun from an urban
legend. As he did so, shivers rippled among his frightened
classmates. This newfound power quashed some of Peele’s own
fears; out in the woods, in the dark, he felt invincible. “I felt like,
if you can’t beat the monsters, join the monsters.”
As he hit his teens he began seriously studying
horror, having had “a breakthrough” after
watching David Cronenberg’sThe Flyand
Kathryn Bigelow’sNear Dark. “The appreciation
for those films outweighed how disturbed I was,”
he says. “We were invited to identify with the
monster. That’s when I started bingeing, seeing all
the horror movies I could.” He decided there and
then to be a horror film director, but that fell away
after he got into improv comedy at university,
eventually meeting actor and comedian Keegan-
Michael Key and forming hugely successful double
act Key & Peele. But Peele’s first love never left
him. “I’d always be looking for a movie to scare me
again,” he says. “There’s a warmth to replaying
one’s childhood, and one of the more powerful
and potent emotions from my childhood was fear.”
This search came with a disappointment in
what the horror landscape had become. Post-9/11,
he says, America needed to purge, and a wave of
torture-porn films arrived. Some he liked, “but
there were too many, and they sucked. It
frustrated me as a horror fan. Maybe I’m a bit of
a horror snob. But seeing the success of the genre
and finding fewer and fewer horror films that I
found compelling went into this recipe of, ‘You
know what? I’m supposed to be making these.’”•••
GET OUTBEGAN germinating after Barack
Obama became President in 2009. Peele did not
buy into what he has called the “post-racial lie”,
a feeling at large that Obama’s victory spelt the
end of racism. Peele wanted to tell a horrorJORDAN
PEELE
DRESSED
AS JACK
TORRANCE
THIS
YEAR.
Facing page:
Peele: “I was
frustrated as
a horror fan.”
Below:A trio of
influences:
Stanley Kubrick’s
The Shining;
David
Cronenberg’s
The Fly; Kathryn
Bigelow’s
Near Dark.❯