What Scares Jordan Peele?

In the last scene of the classic 1968 zombie movie Night of the Living Dead, the hero, Ben, comes out of a cellar with a gun, and the armed vigilantes mistake him for a zombie. They surround him, shoot him, and then burn him with the rest of the ghouls. Ben was played by Duane Jones, a Black actor, and the director, George Romero, has always said he wasn’t making a statement by casting Jones. But when I watched the movie as a young teenager, something about this scene felt significant. A Black man surrounded by a pack of vigilante white people with guns, in 1968, seemed to be answering more than just the basic needs of plot.

Since then I’ve learned a lot more about how race worked in that movie. But for a Black kid interested in horror, the subtext might have been a little more obvious. Jordan Peele grew up writing horror stories in his journals, and occasionally scaring his classmates with them on school trips. In 2017, after a successful sketch-comedy career, he wrote, produced, and directed Get Out, the critically acclaimed horror film. He says the movie “felt very taboo” and “un-produceable” at the time. “I don’t know if you noticed, but Get Out doesn’t have any good white people in it,” he told me. I did notice.

After Peele made that movie, and several others, he says, Black creators started telling him that they too had a horror story to tell, but they had never thought to tell it publicly. Classic horror always seemed to be speaking to white people’s fears about the menace of “the other,”