Jordan Peele - From Comedy to Horror

Abstract

Cinema has evolved throughout the years and it is bound to continue but never leaves certain techniques behind. Many directors and producers populate the film industry today but few really make an impact on the cinematic audience. Genre film is important to categorize to let the audience know what type of film they will be watching and what to expect in the plot. Genre film has also changed and developed today and I will be discussing one that has resurfaced recently: the social thriller. According to the 2017 Brooklyn Academy of Music series “The Art of the Social Thriller,” the genre has been around since Alfred Hitchcock like Rear Window (1954) and Psycho (1960), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer, 1967), Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968), The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), and Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992) just to name a few. The BAM’s description of this series states: “To mark the release of his directorial debut, Jordan Peele curates an eclectic selection of the films that influenced him, from auteur-driven thrillers to social issue dramas to 1990s new-classics” (BAM). What brings all of these movies together? What do they have in common? The social thriller genre uses horror elements to comment on and call out social inequity and today we see movies like Jordan Peele’s work, Get Out (2017), Us (2019), and Nope (2022) bringing back the genre and impacting audiences. Even if Jordan Peele hadn't invented the genre, he made it gain attention after Get Out was released because cinema hadn’t seen this genre in a long time. Many other directors got the inspiration or were pushed to release their work after Peele made his mark with the genre and followed his path, as we see in Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018), Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019), Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019), and Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018). Why was it the right time to make these movies? Did the political tension in the United States lead to these creations? Was Jordan Peele successful at repopularizing the genre? Is eventually depoliticized and subsumed by the racist American entertainment industry? These are questions I will be answering in my chapters starting with Chapter One: “The Political Value of Genre Film,” followed by Chapter Two: “The ‘Post-Racial’ Era and the Resurgence of Fascist Politics,” and finally Chapter Three: “The Horror of Cinema.”