Jordan Peele’s favourite horror movie scene: “It was one of sheer terror”
Thanks to the one-two-three punch of Get Out, Us, and Nope, writer and director Jordan Peele has established himself as a modern master of horror. In a reasonably short time, his unique brand of scares, social commentary, and off-kilter humour has firmly ensnared audiences in his grasp. In fact, he’s already provided horror fans with several indelible scenes to re-watch again and again, such as the now-iconic “sunken place” sequence in Get Out. In addition to adding great scenes to the genre, though, Peele is still a fan at heart, and he once revealed his favourite horror scene in the cinema to an audience.
In 2021, Empire ran a series of personal essays written by filmmakers for its ‘Greatest Cinema Moments Ever’ issue. Movie houses were about to re-open after the pandemic, and anticipation was high, so the magazine wanted to remind its readers how incredible it can be to experience a film on the big screen with a packed audience. Peele’s essay, fittingly, spotlighted a collective feeling of dread that truly stuck with him.
“I saw Paranormal Activity alone in the theatre,” revealed Peele. “It was 11am on the Friday it came out in 2009.”
The audience at that time of the morning was sizeable, especially considering it was a weekday morning. Peele surmised that most of them were kindred spirits who had also rhapsodised about seeing an early screening of The Blair Witch Project in 1999 – and they would soon experience a feeling of impending doom similar to the one generated by that found footage horror classic. In fact, Peele wrote, “There was a moment in that film that elicited a reaction from that audience that will go down as one of the most delicious I’ve experienced.”
Paranormal Activity’s structure is ingenious. It alternates between daytime scenes of young couple Katie and Micah investigating the spooky goings-on in their house before switching to fixed-shot nighttime scenes from the perspective of a camera fitted on a tripod in their bedroom. They are trying to capture the ghostly activity plaguing them on camera, which means the audience is always on edge as soon as the film cuts to one of these scenes.
Peele marvelled: “As they evaluated the new findings during the daytime, the audience relaxed — we were safe. But every time they went to bed for the night, and we returned to that bedroom shot, you could feel the dread and anxiety growing in the audience through the shifting in seats.” The film expertly built tension for around an hour using this structure, with only mildly unnerving things happening in the night scenes – a door moving on its own and Katie doing odd things in her sleep. Then came ‘Night #20‘.
When that title card came up on screen, Peele revealed, “An internal alarm went off in that audience. It was clear, for some primal reason, that this was going to be the night some real messed-up shit happened.” He then described a noise made by the audience that he’d not heard before or since: “At first, it almost resembled an audible eye-roll at the tedium of having to watch this white couple fail at avoiding their own bedroom. But this was not a groan of boredom; it was one of sheer terror, and we all knew it.”
A chorus of nervous giggles broke out, and Peele pulled his hoodie tightly around his face while sinking into his seat. Everyone knew something horrible was about to happen on-screen, but they had no idea what it would be. Suddenly, when Katie was dragged screaming out of her bed and into the hall by an unseen force, Peele claimed his audience “absolutely lost it”.
Amusingly, though, Peele confessed that he missed the moment entirely because he was so unbearably tense, and his hoodie was so tightly wrapped around his head. He wound up returning to the cinema that very night to watch the film again, free to keep his eyes open because he knew what was coming.
He concluded, though, that it wasn’t the horrifying payoff that he loved so much. Instead, “It was that wave of audible ‘here we go’ tension beforehand that I’ll always remember.”
