How Nope director Jordan Peele changed the face of the horror genre

Jordan Peele's career as one of North America's most acclaimed horror filmmakers began only five years ago. Yet the director's influence is felt deeply across the landscape of a once-marginalized genre: a legacy further cemented by the arrival of his third film, Nope, to theatres on Friday.

Following Peele's social thrillers Get Out (2017) and Us (2019), Nope stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as sibling ranchers who run a horse wrangling business for film productions in California.

According to the CBC's Eli Glasner, it's a genre-twisting homage to science-fiction and the western.

Peele, who made an unlikely turn from fresh-faced sketch comic (Key & Peele) to celebrated genre filmmaker, told the Associated Press that he knew it was the right time for his latest offering.

"I feel like this is the first moment that anyone would ever allow me or anyone to make this movie. And so I had to take advantage. I had to go as big as possible," said Peele. "I was like: 'Let's go.'"

The horror genre, long a reliable money-maker at the box office, has always had something to say. But Peele's films have further exposed audiences to horror as a vehicle for sharp, biting social commentary, according to filmmakers and scholars.

In the 1970s, American film critic Robin Wood described horror movies as "our collective nightmares" because they expressed society's greatest fear: that widely accepted social norms could be threatened by the emergence of a previously repressed monster.

But Wood also acknowledged that horror was the most "disreputable" of Hollywood genres, looked down on by reviewers and mocked by audiences. "People [tend] to go to horror films either obsessively or not at all," he wrote.

Peele, who won an Academy Award in 2018 for Get Out's original screenplay, has brought industry prestige to a historically overlooked genre. Among Peele's audience is a generation of BIPOC filmmakers inspired by his storytelling, which is preoccupied with the experiences of people from marginalized communities.

"I never would have thought of writing or directing a piece that was so much more centred in a community and in a voice. And when I saw Get Out, it completely shifted how 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'd previously been reluctant to address her identity in her films. But horror films from around the world have a political edge, she said.

 "When you look at something like zombie films, like when you look at Godzilla, that comes from a post-war Japanese terror, right? So the politics have always been there," just with more reliance on subtext, she said.

Both Get Out and Us made over $250 million US at the domestic box office in the U.S. against production budgets of $4.5 million and $20 million, respectively. Peele's success demonstrates that Black moviegoers expand ticket sales when they're reflected by characters onscreen.

According to a 2019 study by Movio, a movie marketing software firm, Us attracted an audience that was nearly 100 per cent more African American or Black than the audience that attended another horror movie, A Quiet Place.