TERROR VISION

The suspense is building as Jordan Peele's third movie, Nope, prepares to land in cinemas, dripping dread from every inch of the screen. Total Film looks at how an aspiring puppeteer and comic actor became Hitchcock's heir apparent.

- LEILA LATIF

A true horror master knows how to put his audience on edge with just a simple image. In the case of Jordan Peele and the upcoming Nope, his third feature as writer-director, all it takes is a lonely ranch standing against a vast night sky, its lights flickering before the house is plunged into darkness. Feel those chills as three little words crawl onto the screen: From Jordan Peele.

It's been five years since Peele's feature debut Get Out made a star of Daniel Kaluuya, earned hundreds of millions of dollars at the worldwide box office, and nabbed Peele a Best Original Screenplay Oscar. It was a huge win for Blumhouse Productions' business model, whereby directors are afforded modest budgets and generous creative freedom. In the case of Peele, then famous as a sketch performer, it involved gambling that his comedy talents would translate across genres. No one could have expected that the gamble would pay off quite so handsomely.

Becoming a modern-day master of suspense and a horror icon hadn't been the plan for Peele, who was raised by a single white mother on the Upper West side of Manhattan. His Black father was largely absent, and much of his identity was formed by the complex relationship with his race. When he became the first Black man to win a screenwriting Oscar, he dedicated his award to his mother who taught me to love even in the face of hate. But growing up biracial meant that much of Peele's life involved code-switching - altering his behaviour depending on the race of the person he was talking to - and that transient sense of self translated to his comedy. The one thing that you don't figure out as an improviser or a sketch performer is 'What am I? he observed to The New Yorker in 2015. So much of his talent for comedy was rooted in being multivocal, which he attributed to a childhood anxiety of speaking in the wrong voice.