Let These KEY & PEELE Horror Sketches Prepare You For GET OUT
Get Out hits theaters this week (buy your tickets here), and we are celebrating with a week of articles inspired by the film.
Jordan Peele’s upcoming Get Out is some seriously scary and simultaneously hilarious stuff, you guys. Peele goes all out as writer and director to create something that is akin to a more horror centric version of The Stepford Wives, with a structure made out of a hidden (and at times, not so hidden) commentary on topical and racially charged issues.
While Peele and Keegan-Michael Key worked on their sketch series, Key & Peele, they did some great stuff, especially when it came to their Halloween episodes. They were especially good at making fun of racial underlines and genre tropes. If you haven’t seen the Gremlins 2: The New Batch sketch, you really need to. In addition to that, we picked out a few of our favorites.
Alien Imposters: Key and Peele find themselves in a post-apocalyptic world where aliens have taken over. Much like in The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the aliens take on the identity of humans in order to lure them into a trap. The guys inject their comedy into how they test to see if someone is human or alien. For example, a hillbilly alien who invites Key and Peele to come join him and a group of survivors is immediately shot and revealed as an alien. With each encounter, the guys go through a list of racial profile stereotypes that reveal the aliens for what they are. I love how many levels this works on. For being such a short sketch it is kind of amazing how many social commentary points this one hits.
White Zombies: This one takes up racial issues and adds zombies along with Key & Peele trademark funnies. It opens with Kevin Sorbo leading Key and Peele through a zombie infested suburb. Sorbo is attacked by a horde of zombies leaving the guys alone to fend for survival. Once they decide to make a run for it, they realize that none of the zombies are attempting to eat them, and then they notice a white zombie lock its car door as they walk by…
Make-A Wish: What starts off as kind of a sweet idea of a terminally ill kid getting a Make-A-Wish opportunity, takes a dark dive early on. When this kid is offered a chance to make his dreams come true, he chooses to have a bathtub filled and to be allowed to drown a grown man in said bathtub. The sadistic little Damien inspired tyke ends up getting what he needed instead of what he wanted in a dark twist.
Sexy Vampires: Ever wonder why mostly all vampires are full-time sexy? Well, so did Key and Peele. In this sketch they take a group of leather bound hissing vampires and introduce them to an everyday-guy vamp. He singlehandedly defies all sexy vampire stereotypes and creates a new breed of vampire, the kind that skips out on leather, dark clubs and repetitive electronic dance music and just acts like a regular people.
Roommate Meeting: The guys take on J-Horror, frat bros and challenging names in this sketch. When one of the bros calls a roommate meeting, in order to find out why spooky stuff is happening around the house, they are willing to call out everybody except for the Ringu/Grudge dude hanging out doing ghost-like things all around them. Say what you will about the delivery of this sketch but personally, the names of these frat bros alone kill me.
