Talk about “spooky ookie” stories, Keke Palmer was joined by horror movie expert Jordan Peele on the Baby, This is Keke Palmer podcasts to dive into why people enjoy horror movies and revealing what makes them shriek at night.
LISTEN NOW: Why We Love to be Scared with Jordan Peele
Right off the bat, Jordan Peele revealed that his biggest fear is in fact– cockroaches. ”When I was a kid, growing up in New York City… we had these cockroaches, waterbugs… there's something about the way they’re fast and then they’re very still,” he shared. “They have this method of movement that they know something you don’t know.”
He compared it to the feeling of being in the presence of an alien, like there is a being that has the upper hand over you.
But Keke quickly dove deep into what about cockroaches actually scares him. “It's interesting the way you think about it because it's really not actually the cockroach, it's the fact that someone might know something that you don’t know and that you're in the essence of something that you can’t really predict anything of.”
She then transitioned into her general fear of the 1990 horror movie, IT. While on a surface level, that gory clown would scare anyone, Keke realized her true fear came from “the practicality of life, the horror that life can bring itself, that someone can just decide to murder you.”
Staying on the track of movies, Peele revealed that as a horror connoisseur himself, he does like to be scared, and ghost movies really do the job. “Paranormal Activity got me,” he shared, “that scared the s*** out of me.”
Now Peele originally comes from a comedy background and Keke, like many others, wondered what got him into wanting to make thriller/horror movies. He shared that he felt like the industry was missing something, “I wasn’t seeing enough horror that I liked.”
He believes that there are keen similarities between the two genres. “I felt the similarity between the two… both things are just very much about how you can get the audience to have a physical, visceral reaction to something.”
“You need a laugh or you need a scream and you can get the validation, you’re either successful or you're not,” he shared, feeling that he could successfully build off of that and bounce between the genres.
For more of this conversation, check out the full episode above.
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