Jordan Peele, most noted for his comedy sketches on MADtv and Key & Peele, is taking a huge artistic leap in a new direction. Get Out, Peele’s new major motion picture project, starring Daniel Kaluuya, is a horror movie, displaying America’s history of racial tension, according to Okayplayer.
The actor/filmmaker showed an interest in creating a horror movie for quite awhile. “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,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “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.”
Peele’s entry into the horror genre is important, as Black directors are usually discouraged from creating horror films, as opposed to romances or comedies, despite horror pictures being less expensive to make. Horror films, typically thought to be exclusive territory for white directors and audiences, are able to illuminate political and social stigmas that people are afraid to confront. Gothic horror, more to the point, aptly describes the entire African Diaspora, which several other indie horror outlets run by Black women, Audre’s Revenge Film Collective and Graveyard Shift Sisters, have aimed to bring to public attention.
While the late Wes Craven briefly touched on horror films excluding Black folks in the beginning of Scream 2, with Jada Pinkett-Smith and Omar Epps, and Blade trilogy series starred veteran actor Wesley Snipes, not since 1995’s Tales From The Hood, which was a breakthrough film that explored the history of enslavement, abuse, and police brutality, will a horror film that explicitly deals with racial trauma be explored on the big screen for mainstream audiences.
Watch the film’s trailer below, slated for release on Feb. 24, 2017.