“That fear is a very real thing”: Jordan Peele names cinema’s six greatest social thrillers
Who knew that Jordan Peele was such a sicko?
After making us laugh for years as one half of Key & Peele, he unleashed his full creative potential with the release of his debut feature film, Get Out, following it up with Us and Nope to firmly establish himself as one of the faces of the horror genre. He just does horror, though, right?
In 2017, the Oscar winner curated a series of films for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s ‘Cinématek’ programme, called ‘The Art of the Social Thriller’, which featured a somewhat eclectic array of movies that all impacted Peele in some form or fashion, and while most of them were horror or horror-adjacent, not all of them were, which leads us to the question of what a social thriller is.
Luckily for my brain, Peele explained exactly what the genre was to The New Yorker, noting that there is a lot of crossover between horrors and social thrillers, but there is one key difference.
“In a social thriller, the monster at hand is society,” he explained, “Whether in an allegorical sense, as in Night of the Living Dead, or in a metaphorical sense, like Rosemary’s Baby. Candyman explores fear of the ghetto, in that case, Cabrini-Green, in Chicago. Misery is about fandom and the way we idolise and worship people. The beauty is that many horror movies and many thrillers do deal with society in some way, but in the social thriller, it’s society that is the villain… That fear is a very real thing.”
The term ‘social thriller’ first appeared in the 1970s and was used to describe neo-noir movies from several decades earlier. It gained a renewed focus following the release of Get Out, as critics picked up on the similarities between Peele’s work and some of the movies he mentioned in that quote. While Get Out has more overtly racial themes, George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Bernard Rose’s original version of Candyman are more subtle with their depictions of social tension.
This leads us to another film included in the programme in the form of 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, starring the great Sidney Poitier as a young Black man in a relationship with a white woman played by Katharine Houghton.
Her parents (Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) clumsily attempt to welcome their prospective son-in-law into the family, playing on many of the fears of interracial marriage that were present in American society at the time, and while it’s not a horror by any stretch, the themes of racial tension and acceptance can clearly be seen throughout Peele’s work.
To round things out, he also gave a shoutout to Wes Craven’s 1991 comedy-horror The People Under the Stairs. Facing eviction, three African-Americans break into the home of their white landlords to help pay the rent, but once inside, they discover a dark secret about the outwardly squeaky-clean individuals known as ‘Mommy’ and ‘Daddy’. Alongside its racial elements, the film is also satirisation of gentrification and class, both of which are also themes of Get Out.
Jordan Peele’s favourite social thrillers:
- Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer, 1967)
- Night of the Living Dead (George A Romero, 1968)
- Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)
- Misery (Rob Reiner, 1990)
- The People Under the Stairs (Wes Craven, 1991)
- Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992)
