The line between comedy and horror is often much thinner than you’d expect. No film director has embodied this idea in recent years than Jordan Peele, who started in sketch comedy but has become one of modern horror’s defining directors, first with the genre-changing Get Out and then with its equally thought-provoking follow-up, Us. With his latest Nope coming out this week, it's safe to say that Peele has pretty firmly established himself as a horror director who’s well aware of the genre’s tropes, but is able to subvert them with his signature brand of social satire that also doesn’t skimp on genuinely terrifying moments.
While it now feels as if Jordan Peele’s ascendency to horror movie auteur now makes total sense, it wasn’t always that way. When Peele made his transition to directing in 2017, he was still mostly known as one half of the TV sketch comedy duo Key & Peele, who had a somewhat muted transition to the big screen in 2016’s Keanu while teaming up with their frequent Key & Peele director Peter Atencio. However, working alongside Antecio, Key & Peele’s sketches offer a window into the duo’s — and specifically Peele’s — horror obsessions, since despite how absurd and wacky a lot of their comedy is, they’re not as detached from Peele’s work as a director as you might assume. Peele’s partner Keegan-Michael Key even saw the seeds of Peele’s horror career being planted while working on their show, saying in an Indiewire piece from 2017, “I would watch him solve problems on set and I just knew he was going to be a director."
So let’s take a look at some horror-infused sketches from Key & Peele where you can start to see the ideas and motifs that would be expanded on in Jordan Peele’s movies.
Baby Forest (Season 1, Episode 8)
Though Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele were far from the first comedy team to do film parodies or sketches entirely without a laugh track, their influence in making modern sketch comedy more cinematic is undeniable. Though the set-up of this Season 1 sketch is pretty simple (a veteran babysitter encounters an especially creepy toddler), it hints at Key & Peele’s ability to play with horror movie tropes within the sketch comedy realm. It’s also unabashed in using the possibilities of filmed sketch comedy vs. live sketch comedy in its use of an incredibly odd-looking Jordan Peele head digitally placed on top of a child’s body. The creepy horror movie child is a trope Key & Peele would skewer again in the Make-A-Wish sketch, but this one feels key (no pun intended) in establishing the duo’s brand of often unsettling dark humor combined with pop culture irreverence, with Peele doing a perplexing but nonetheless welcome Forest Whitaker impression.
White Zombies (Season 2, Episode 6)
As the children of biracial parents, Key and Peele were particularly suited to pinpoint the racial dynamics of Obama-era America, and “White Zombies” is one of the many great examples of that. Though there’s not a ton to this sketch, with its core idea of what would happen if there was a zombie invasion in which all the zombies happened to be racist, it shows that Key and Peele could be just as good at reacting to a high-concept premise as they are at refined character work. Also, it hints at Jordan Peele’s future career as a satirical horror director and the fact that there was a ton of untapped potential in terms of horror movies as racism allegories that existed when he first burst onto the scene with Get Out.
Sexy Vampires (Season 3, Episode 7)
By Season 3 of Key & Peele, it seemed that the show’s creative team had so many ideas for horror-themed sketches that they decided to just do an entire Halloween episode composed entirely of these sketches. Seeing as the show was starting to hit its stride as pretty much the best sketch show around in the mid-2010s, a couple more of that episode’s sketches are included below.
A few years before What We Did In The Shadows (both the movie and TV show) went to town on spoofing the more mundane logistics of vampiric life, “Sexy Vampires” did the same, albeit in a much more bite-size form. Peele plays the leader of a coven of vampires who seem to place more importance on wearing leather pants with laces up the sides and licking each other sexily than actually feasting on blood. Key plays the coven’s newest recruit, who is modestly dressed, and points out the ridiculousness of the vampires’ lifestyle. It’s a great showcase for the duo’s versatility, as Key tended to play the more live-wire half of the pair (exemplified by his early breakout character Luther, Obama’s anger translator), but he still had the ability to play a very funny straight-man.
Psycho Clown (Season 3, Episode 7)
By the time this sketch aired, the “torture porn” subgenre of horror movies kick-started by the Saw franchise had more or less run its course. Still, it's not a genre that has been parodied quite as much as other horror subgenres, perhaps because its inherent bleakness just makes it a little too hard to wring laughs out of. So, it makes absolute sense that the way Key and Peele figured out a way to spoof torture porn was by both capturing the dingy visuals of the genre while plopping two characters in a torture chamber who are able to maintain a surprisingly positive and upbeat attitude. It’s one of those Key & Peele sketches where the duo just excels at bouncing funny one-liners off of each other, with the stand-out being, “What a dramatic and fascinating man,” while talking about their clown-faced captor.
Continental Breakfast (Season 3, Episode 7)
Though maybe not the most horror-heavy sketch included in this Halloween episode, it still does end with a well-placed nod to The Shining, which along with another earlier Shining-themed sketch shows that Key and Peele have at least somewhat of a fascination with Stanley Kubrick’s icy masterwork. But besides that, "Continental Breakfast" is worth mentioning just because it’s one of the all-time great Key & Peele sketches (and perhaps my personal favorite). As far as Jordan Peele’s work as a sketch performer, it’s an amazing showcase of his formidable talents in front of the camera, even if he would eventually find even greater success behind it. He displays such a wide range of ridiculous emotions while devouring the type of mediocre complimentary breakfast we’ve all endured while staying at a mid-tier hotel. Then that Kubrick-esque ending makes it a perfect example of a Key & Peele sketch that’s rooted in the everyday mundane but also has a tinge of the sinister that hints at Peele’s future directorial style.
Alien Imposters (Season 4, Episode 1)
Much like “White Zombies”, “Alien Imposters” has a similar vibe of showing the ways in which people’s racism (or desire not to be perceived as racist) might still exist in the post-apocalypse. Also, much like that prior sketch, it has slight tinges of Get Out’s mix of social satire and people’s bodies being taken over. Additionally, it’s another great example of the show’s ability to emulate the visuals of Hollywood blockbusters while being sharper than most Hollywood blockbusters. We’ll see if the sketch’s combination of sci-fi and horror bears any similarity to Nope.
Hall of Mirrors (Season 4, Episode 6)
Speaking of Jordan Peele movies that aren’t Get Out, this “Hall of Mirrors” sketch can’t help but bring to mind the use of a funhouse hall of mirrors in 2019’s Us. It shows how Peele’s background in obsessing over and lampooning genre tropes informed his ability as a director to create truly chilling moments onscreen when he would lean into playing his comedic tendencies totally straight. The sketch is taken from the Season 4 Halloween episode and plays on the fact that many various serial killer thriller movies tend to end up in a carnival house of mirrors for some reason, where our cop protagonist must determine what is a mirror reflection of the villain and what is not. It’s another great use of Peele’s ability to throw himself into an unsettling (but still oddly funny) character.
Non-Scary Movie (Season 4, Episode 6)
Another sketch from the Season 4 Halloween episode, "Non-Scary Movie" imagines the all-too-relatable premise of walking out of a scary movie with your friend and then tearing apart the movie for not being terribly scary. Though through some solid physical comedy, the two guys that Key and Peele play reveal that the movie clearly left some sort of mark on them that has made them skittish about the outside world. While it’s maybe not the most brilliant Key & Peele sketch of all time, it nonetheless feels weirdly autobiographical in terms of how Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele must have obsessed over horror movies while conceiving of the show and incorporating whatever clichés they saw in these films into their sketch comedy. Though they’re clearly playing more over-the-top characters than themselves here, it shows that the dudes just loved to talk about horror and that their sly knowledge of what is and isn’t scary makes it unsurprising that one of them would go on to help shape the genre.