Following the smart horror comedy box office breakout that was Get Out, Jordan Peele is back at it with a new project.
The writer and director is working to adapt Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country as a horror anthology series – it centres on Atticus, a young Army veteran who takes a road trip through America in the 1950s, searching for his missing dad. Along with his friend and uncle, the trio navigates racist, evil men as the U.S teeters on the cusp of the civil rights movement, while also dealing with dangerous, malevolent spirits.
According the Variety, the series has been picked up by HBO. Peele will act as an executive producer, alongside Underground’s co-creator Misha Green, who will write and executive produce, and J.J Abrams and Ben Stephenson. There’s no word yet though on a release date.
“I wanna stay in the genre,” Peele previously told Variety's Playback Podcast. “While I was developing (Get Out) I was also simultaneously developing four other projects that I call social thrillers. Each one is meant to deal with a different human demon; a different monster that sort of lurks underneath the way that we interact with one another as human beings.
“So I hope to soon direct another one of these social thrillers. It’s not gonna be about race, it’ll be about something else, but it’s gonna be very cinematic and fun,” he added. “To come up with the perfect monster for a horror movie we really need to look no further than the monster that is all of us. Not so much an individual psycho killer, but the humanity that gets lost between us.”
News recently emerged that Jason Blum, the producer of Get Out, and screenwriter and director Dee Rees, are working together on a currently untitled movie based on Rees’s own experiences living in rural America as a black lesbian.
Read more about Peele’s Get Out, a masterpiece exploring systematic racism, isolation and cultural appropriation, which elevates black characters above what the horror genre has done with the underdeveloped secondary sidekick, here on Dazed.
h/t Deadline
