JORDAN PEELE’S NEW NIGHTMARES
He’d wanted to for a long time, for no reason other than a deep love of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but this was a particularly covert cosplay: while promoting his second feature Us, he arrived for a filmed interview seemingly incognito in a plaid shirt and red corduroy jacket. One eagle-eyed The Shining geek spotted the reference, though, duly screen-grabbing it and tweeting it to the movie masses. “All work and no play,” responded Peele, ’fessing up.
“It was just a fun thing,” he says now. “I honestly didn’t expect anyone to pick up on it, but it was cool that they did. But I would have done that years before I was a filmmaker and doing press. The Easter egg life is a way of life.” He laughs. But he’s not joking.
It’s 1pm in Los Angeles, and Peele is lunching at casa Monkeypaw, his production company nestled in the Hollywood Hills, taking a break from “shifting between several writing projects” to talk to Empire. This house is full of Easter eggs: the armchair that lowers the hero of Get Out into the Sunken Place lives here, as does Rose’s frankly evil little bag from the same film, while the walls feature Get Out fan art alongside official posters.
JORDAN PEELE DRESSED AS JACK TORRANCE THIS YEAR.
Peele’s movies are likewise full of hidden, and Hitchcock inspired , and are all homaged within, while the film is littered with subtle references, as well as nods to and . Such shenanigans also abound in , which begins in 1986 on the same Santa Cruz boardwalk on which 1987’s was filmed. “You know, they’re shooting a movie over there by the carousel,” says one character. Peele is massively meta. He’s always bled genre. Now, as Hollywood’s new horror master, he’s bathing in it.
