5 Jordan Peele Movies and TV Shows to Watch Before Scare Tactics

If you need proof of the throughline between comedy and horror, look no further than Jordan Peele's career. Peele made a name for himself cracking jokes and writing sketches on shows like Mad TV and Key & Peele before making a hard left turn for horror. He’s spoken in multiple venues about the similarities between the genres, even once saying “the difference between comedy and horror is the music.”

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That thesis is clearly demonstrated in Scare Tactics, a hidden-camera horror-comedy show that first aired on SYFY for 5 seasons between 2003 and 2013 and is now returning this fall to USA Network with a new take from Peele and his Monkeypaw Productions group.

The series was first hosted first by Shannen Doherty, then Stephen Baldwin, and finally by Tracy Morgan. It’s been more than a decade since the final season of the OG series aired but, like the monsters that populate each episode, Scare Tactics is set to rise from the grave once again.

Historically, the show has placed its participants (victims) into horrifying scenarios complete with movie-quality special effects. Usually, participants are volunteered by their family or friends, and pushed to the edge of terror before the gag is revealed. Existing episodes feature horror, sci-fi, and other genre tropes including alien abductions, demons, ghost trains, killer clowns, and more. New episodes will pick up where the series left off, with the added benefit of a decade of special effects advancements.

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Scare Tactics is gearing up for new episodes starting on October 4 on USA Network. In the meantime, get your fear muscles primed with these other spooky offerings from Jordan Peele.

Get Out

By 2017, Peele was already a well-known voice in comedy, but his first film proved he had even more range. Get Out didn’t just put Peele on the horror map, it made him a go-to destination.

The movie stars Daniel Kaluuya (Queen & Slim, Black Panther) as Chris Washington, a young Black man dating Rose Armitage (Allison Williams; M3GAN, Girls), a young white woman. The two of them head to upstate New York for the weekend so Chris can meet Rose’s parents. The Armitages are a well-to-do white couple, a neurosurgeon and a psychiatrist, whose racist microaggressions are the least of Chris’ worries. Their dual expertise, both related to the brain, come into play in the film’s big reveal, when the sinister activities of the family and their wider community become clear.

Us

Peele’s sophomore film, Us, begins in 1986, when a young Adelaide Thomas visits the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk with her parents. She wanders into the house of mirrors and encounters Red, a living reflection with a mind and desires of her own. The experience is so traumatic that Adelaide doesn’t speak for years.

Decades later, a now-adult Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o; The Wild Robot, A Quiet Place: Day One), her husband, and their two children are attacked by a family of doppelgangers. They call themselves the Tethered, and it's revealed there is one Tethered mirror image for each person on the planet. Their origin is unclear, but they’ve spent their lives in our collective shadow, watching, waiting, and now it’s their turn to live in the light. Even if we all have to die for them to do so.

Nope

Peele’s 2022 film Nope presents a story of both personal and cosmic proportions. Daniel Kaluuya returns alongside Keke Palmer (Password, Akeelah and the Bee) as the Haywoods (OJ Jr. and Emerald, respectively), a family of horse trainers who work on Hollywood productions.

To help make ends meet, they’ve been selling some of their horses to Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun; Beef, Minari), a former child star turned theme park operator. He’s running a Western-themed park called Jupiter’s Claim and selling the notoriety, which comes with being the only survivor of a tragedy that happened on set when he was a child. Things get weird when a UFO shows up and starts abducting horses. Things get even weirder when the Haywoods — with the help of I.T. expert Angel Torres (Brandon Perea; Twisters) — realize that the spacecraft is actually a territorial predator in disguise.

Candyman

The 2021 supernatural horror Candyman isn’t part of the proper Peele horror canon, but you can feel his influence on screen. It was directed by Nia DaCosta and written by Peele, DaCosta, and Win Rosenfeld. Candyman serves as a direct sequel to the 1992 film of the same name.

The movie begins in 1977, when a young boy witnesses the brutal murder of a Black man wrongly accused of putting a razor blade in a white kid’s candy. Decades later, Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II; Watchmen, Aquaman) is stung by a bee while searching for artistic inspiration. He meets an adult William Burke, the child who witnessed the 1977 murder, who tells him about the Candyman.

It’s an urban legend, much like many you’ve heard before — say "Candyman" five times in a mirror and he’ll appear, with deadly consequences — but McCoy becomes obsessed. The legend bleeds into his work and that bee sting spreads, transforming McCoy, body and mind, into the collective vengeance for centuries of racial violence.

The Twilight Zone

First envisioned in 1959 by the late-great Rod Serling, for more than half a century, The Twilight Zone has taken viewers to another dimension — a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind — on a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of the imagination.

The series was rebooted for a modern audience in 2019 by Jordan Peele, who also executive-produced the show with Monkeypaw Productions. Perhaps Peele's biggest contribution to the series was stepping into Serling’s role as the Narrator, providing an anchor point as viewers traveled the unseen highways of The Twilight Zone. Like its predecessor, the show was an anthology series featuring standalone stories and a revolving door of celebrity guest appearances.

Each episode was written and directed by different folks, though Peele did write the Season 2 episode “Downtimes” and was part of the writing team for “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet,” based on Richard Matheson’s famed original episode. The series ran for 20 episodes across two seasons before the doorway to The Twilight Zone was closed once again. For now.

Scare Tactics will premiere on USA Network Friday, October 4 at 10 p.m. ET. The debut episode will simultaneously air on Bravo, SYFY, and E!.