What Scares Jordan Peele?

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Before Jordan Peel was Jordan Peale, the famous director, he was just a ninth grader starting a new school.

And up until this moment, I was a kid who was really afraid of monsters of the dark, of people breaking into my apartment, you know, all this stuff.

And then one weekend, he went on a camping trip with his class and something happened.

I told a scary story, a sort of standard in my book.

You had a book.

You had a book in 10%.

I had a couple.

I had a couple.

The one he chose was this.

A woman and her husband are in a car driving through the town where she grew up.

They pass by a house and she sees a shadow on the top floor.

And she says to her husband, that's where this girl Annie used to live.

Annie, the wife tells him, is this girl in school they all used to make fun of, Annie with the red hair.

And then the car breaks down and her husband goes to find a payphone.

18 minutes go by, 29 minutes go by, 45 minutes, the husband isn't back yet.

And then,

actually, I'm not going to tell you the ending.

It's not my story to tell.

But for Little Jordan, it worked.

I felt like I had this captive audience.

And after this moment, I was able to,

I just remember feeling lifted of so many fears, purged of so many fears.

And I remember remember just feeling so liberated.

This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Hannah Rosen.

Jordan's fear purge, I totally get it.

As a kid, I used to watch movies like The Exorcist and Damien, but only ever with my father.

And at the end of each movie we watched together, I felt totally safe and calm.

Horror does this for us.

It helps us settle into fear as individuals, but also sometimes on a grander scale as a society.

Sometimes there can be a monster that represents a collective fear, but what that monster looks like depends on who is telling the story.

Today I'm talking to Jordan Peale about what happens when black directors and writers tell stories about their collective fears.

He's just edited a new short story collection, in time for Halloween, called Out There Screaming.

I'm also talking to best-selling sci-fi writer N.K.

Jemison, who wrote the first story in the collection.

She goes by Nora, by the way.

As it happens, Nora used to be a psychologist.

So I started by asking her about that campfire moment Jordan talked about.

You're afraid, you tell a story, and then you feel liberated.

How does that actually work?

It sounds a lot to me like the theory of catharsis and that when you are experiencing or have experienced trauma, but even if you're still in the moment with it, one of the ways that you can kind of purge the energy of that, the fear, is to confront it, you know, make fun of it or tell a story about it or write a story down.

There's any number of ways where just simply confronting it and just letting yourself play with the thing that scares you can help you overcome your fear of it.

So it's like a creative form of exposure therapy.

I mean, you, exposure therapy is, is you're being given something that you don't like, you don't feel, you don't care about.

With catharsis and particularly with writing your catharsis or reading your catharsis or telling a story, you are making yourself love it.

You're finding a reason to care about it.

Yeah, like it gives you a sense of control.

It's not just, I'm not afraid anymore.

It's like, I can actually do something with this.

And I can see something valuable in it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jordan, when you made Get Out, which was back in 2017, did it feel like you were doing something new or risky, mixing classic horror with the contemporary day-to-day black experience?

Yeah, you know, in many ways, it really did.

It felt very taboo.

There were a couple of things like a scary movie, you know, that had a very

silly tone and worked for the same crowd.

But this idea that you could make a movie about race that dealt with violence against black people and every white person in the film is a villain, as it turns out.

Spoiler alert.

Noticed.

We noticed.

Noticed.

And so

that,

I mean, yeah, it felt like it was an unproducible film.

And that's what tickled me about it.

It was this box.

that I felt like I had been put in in many ways and something I was told was impossible that I couldn't do.

and yet it was a movie I wanted to see.

And then, all the way up through making it, I was sure at any moment they could realize that this was very

risky film to put out there.

And I didn't know, I thought there was a good chance that

everybody could hate it and everyone could find offense in this idea that the way I was taking my power back

was

through this expression of fun horror escapism, you know, or fun for me at least.

And of course, the response was

a sort of collective catharsis, is what I felt.

You know, it was just the opposite of

my fears.

And a lot of people approached me and said, you know, I have been, I have another

black horror sort of idea.

Is that where the book came from?

Yeah, we can't make enough movies to fit all the stories that I'm kind of giddy to read.

So you

called your new collection of horror stories Out There Screaming, Jordan.

And knowing your work, my first thought was, okay, this has several meanings.

Like it could mean out there in the movie theater screaming with my popcorn, or it could mean out there on the street screaming at a protest, or out there screaming, you know, in solitary confinement and no one is listening.

Am I reading too much into it, into the title?

No, you're not.

You know, I think it sort of connects to this central motif of the sunken place from Get Out that is

a metaphor for a certain sort of marginalization.

The marginalization at the time that I was trying to get across was

feeling like my point of view, my perspective, and my skin kind of wasn't making it into

this space, and it was frustrating.

And so, in many ways, what I was looking for in these short stories was other people's sunken place in a way.

Nora, you wrote the story Reckless Eyeballing.

Can you just say a few words about what that story is about and who the main character is?

Sure.

Reckless eyeballing is from the perspective of a cop named Carl, who is a cop in a small town.

He's a black man.

He's not a great person.

Definitely has done some bad cop things and is part of a fairly corrupt small town police force.

But he, you know, is basically just kind of merrily going along doing his usual bad cop life when he starts to see the headlights on cars transform into real human eyes,

eyelashes, blinking, all of that.

Have you guys ever seen the Volkswagen Beetles with the cute little eyes?

Like, that's not what's happening here.

That is not it.

It depends on how cute you think those eyes would be if they had like

blood vessels and

eye bookers.

And you know, I mean, like,

do you really want that?

I want to see that.

No one wants to see that.

Not cute, yeah.

Maybe if you don't mind, we can just read like a paragraph here because I think you get the not cute vibe from this paragraph.

Sure, sure, okay.

Carl started seeing the eyes a few months back.

Thought they were just some new headlight fad at first.

Every year there's a new one, neon rims, insectoid multiple bulbs, designs like hearts or cobra hoods.

Tacky, but not illegal.

These eyes, though, are far too realistic to be simply another mod.

They blink.

There are veins throughout the sclera, striations in the irises, boogers at the corners.

On the lone occasion when Carl actually sees them manifest, plain old halogen one moment and then blink and they're blinking, Carl realizes something else.

The eyes are a magical thing, or supernatural, if there's any difference.

He asks around, casually mentioning the new headlight fad to a couple of his fellow highway patrol officers, but no one has seen them.

Nobody mentions freaky car eyes.

It's Carl's specific magic, or blessing, or a psychic gift, just for him.

When we come back, we talk about the eyes.

They show up in a lot of Jordan's movies, too.

That's after the break.

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The eyes.

What are the eyes?

What are they doing?

I always leave room for interpretation, but I will talk about what they are for me, which is just

if you were a cop, if you were a black cop, and you are still doing this work in the Year of Our Lord 2023,

you have got got to be aware of the strange space that you occupy between your role as an enforcer of systemic racism and being a person who is targeted by that role.

And I just feel like, you know, anybody that is doing this work is probably constantly aware of being watched, being watched by their fellow officers, being watched by their fellow black people, and being judged the whole time.

So I just wanted to make that literal.

I mean, this, yeah, this story really

creaked me out.

It really

shivered me timbers.

And

so to speak,

I feel like the eyes motif, as you mentioned, emerges in several of these stories.

And it is so fascinating because in so many ways, the eyes are this

sometimes beautiful, but often nightmarish source of the trauma of the black experience.

You know, with Get Out, I realized this idea of the white gaze, so to speak, in its most benevolent seeming, there's still an undertone of being

worth as much as you look like, as opposed to worth who you are, what's inside.

And on the flip side, eyes from the black experiences,

this is our way of knowing the truth and being assured of the truth that we're often told isn't true.

I would love to put what you guys are doing in a broader context.

One common strong interpretation of horror is that it was historically made to process white people's fears.

You know, Birth of a Nation, the character Gus, King Kong, zombie movies.

It's just a fear of the dark other.

And I just wonder: if you're a young black person interested in horror, is that something you pick up on a subconscious level, on a conscious level, and you think you want to push back against?

Well, you know, I think you pick it up on a subconscious level.

You know,

the thing I threw out earlier about the fact that Get Out doesn't have any white good guys in it.

Obviously, it was one of the riskiest pieces of the film, but I think it actually is in many ways the single most cathartic part of it.

You'll note one of the, you know, the kind of most classic moments is when Rose, Chris's adoring

white girlfriend, says, You know, you can't leave.

You know, I can't give you the keys, right, babe.

And it all kind of dawns on you.

What's been right in front of you the whole time.

But I think what is happening for filmgoers is we're so ingrained

that

any film that exists must have at least one good white person so that the white audience feels okay.

So that they have somebody that they can say, well, that's me.

I'm not racist.

I relate to this person.

Well,

the second this movie

get out removed that comfort.

the film sort of showed itself for what it really was, which was a movie for black people first.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm still amazed you got that movie made.

I'm delighted, but I'm still like, wow, they let this out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nora, I remember in a profile of you in The New Yorker, you recalled a moment when Octavia Butler was asked, why do you incorporate black characters?

And she said, just to say, hey, we're here.

And your response to that is, we have to keep saying it.

Do you still think that's true?

Like, there's a part of me that thinks the popularity of Get Out in Jordan's movies made it clear.

Like it injected the whole genre with this whole new life and relevancy.

And I wonder if

you feel like we have to keep saying it.

I very much do.

The presence of one great black film auteur in horror is not enough.

We need terrible black films.

We need,

you know, I mean, like this is this is the thing that I've been saying, you know, kind of in every medium, but we will have arrived when we can put out just as much mediocre crap as,

you know, white creators do.

And it's simply because right now, you know, you're seeing our best and brightest.

You're seeing our most exceptional.

But that doesn't mean we've arrived.

That means the door has just cracked open.

That's amazing.

I feel like that's the perfect place to end on a rousing call for mediocre crap.

That's where we'll stop this.

All right.

Thank you both so much.

Thank you.

Happy Halloween.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Bye.

Thank you.

You too.

All right.

This episode was produced by Ethan Brooks.

It was engineered by Rob Smirciak.

Fact-checking by Isabel Christo.

The executive producer of Atlantic Audio is Claudina Bade, and our managing editor is Andrea Valdez.

I'm Hannah Rosen, and we'll be back next week.