Horror and surroundings

As in one of the last pieces, a brief portrait of one of the best emerging directors, Robert Eggers, was attempted on the occasion of the release of his third film The Northman, also this month we will approach the US director Jordan Peele in occasion of the release in the summer, simultaneously with the States, of his third film Nope. Peele is an African American filmmaker (still an uncommon fact in a polarized society like the US) who since the first film he specializes in an author's horror cinema, tinged with social themes.

Without bothering the great modern masters (Romero, Carpenter), this genre - when done at its best - has always had a very close relationship with contemporaneity and manages to bring out the many unsolved themes of our society that distress our lives. For Peele in 2017's Get Out the conflict of integration only on the facade marks a story of a young man who, visiting his girlfriend's white parents, spends a weekend that is not at all peaceful ... a perfect film with a script full of twists that earned him an Oscar on the first try.

Peele was soon granted a great field of action by the US majors and ours expanded to become an actor and then co-producer in 2018 of Black Klansmann of the dean of Afro directors Spike Lee (other Oscar nominations) to then develop a third season of The Edge of Reality , the science fiction series that Hitchcock and Spielberg also collaborated on in the previous decades.

Now recognized as a talent, Peele is shooting in 2019 Us a very disturbing thriller that plays with the theme of the doppleganger or the double, the double, the ghostly duplicate of a living person . In this case, a family on vacation in a cottage is disturbed by exact copies in a very disturbing effect.

While the trailer doesn't reveal much, his new film Nope is clearly another social paranormal horror with a mystery at its core. Kaluuya and Palmer play ranch owners, in a small California town: James and Jill Haywood, witness a "disturbing and chilling discovery" which, judging by the clip, could be aliens, ghosts or alien ghosts.

Peele wanted the film to be released this summer immediately only in cinemas: after all, what's the point of being scared alone on the sofa?


Davide Bracco
NP June / July 2022