Jordan Peele is an American filmmaker, comedian, and actor. Nearly 20 years after his breakout role on the sketch TV show, Mad TV, he has become a legend in horror. Without Jordan Peele, the world would be without new horror staples Us, Get Out, and Nope. With such impressive credits under his name, his opinion of movies is not one to be taken lightly. While this list is not exhaustive, these are some of Jordan Peele’s top 11 favorite movies of all time.

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11 The Babadook

     Umbrella Entertainment

After her husband’s death, a newly single mother frighteningly discovers that the monsters under her son’s bed aren’t so easy to scare off when neither of them can tell if they are real or just paranoia fueled by grief and depression. With a truly haunting monster, Peele was not ashamed to admit that The Babadook scared the pants off of him.

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10 It Follows

     The Weinstein Company

The movie It Follows is a very scary metaphor for STDs that would make anyone consider celibacy. While it perpetuates STD-related fear-mongering, the vessel of the metaphor is downright creepy. A young girl in the Detroit suburbs loses her virginity only to find her boyfriend gave her something the doctor cannot fix: a phantom that is out to kill her unless she can pass the curse onto someone else through sex, and even if she successfully passes the curse if the person she passes it to is killed, she’s back to square one.

Why Jordan Peele’s Us Needs a Sequel

This movie is a slow-burn and keeps audiences, including Jordan Peele, right at the edge of their seats with perfectly timed jump scares and a story that is just close enough to reality for it to plague your brain forever. If It Follows is a movie that both excites and creeps out the man who created Us, it is definitely worth the watch.

9 Halloween

     Compass International Pictures

Halloween is a chilling slasher film that paved the way for horror cinema over the past four decades. This movie’s villain, Michael Myers, fascinates Peele because his need to kill seems to come from a sense of fascination and curiosity as opposed to the typical pure evil slasher villain. For Peele, this movie sits in his top 11 mainly because there is a shot in the movie where Michael Myers is standing outside the window, almost undetectable until he isn’t.

8 The Fly

     20th Century Fox

The Fly follows a scientist (Jeff Goldblum) as his teleportation goes worse than he could’ve ever imagined. While testing his teleportation machine on himself, a fly’s DNA is combined with his in the process and his presumed and short-lived success crumbled before his girlfriend’s eyes as she watched him slowly wither away into a fly-like monster.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Jordan Peele regards the plot as, “So scary, so inappropriate for how old I was, and yet I was able to watch it and understand it, and at the end of it, I felt less scared than I did before watching it, so that’s how I knew the power of horror.” He also comments on the fact that while the images were gruesome, it was the first horror movie that shook him to his core, thus sticking with him for more reasons than just the image of Jeff Goldblum’s melting face.

7 Alien

This science fiction horror masterpiece follows the crew of the commercial space tug Nostromo, as they discover a suspicious spaceship in uncharted territory, only to be met with a vicious alien for the fight of their lives. With his most recent success, Nope, it should come as no surprise that one of his favorites is the classic extraterrestrial horror film, Alien.

His love of the macabre is nothing without a good creature. In a YouTube video on the Fear: The Home of Horror channel, Peele applauds the aesthetic and cinematic elements in Ridley Scott’s Alienby saying it can only be rivaled by Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street for the best design of any horror movie.

6 Rosemary’s Baby

     Paramount Pictures

Rosemary’s Baby is about a young woman who is pregnant with a baby she is sure is not from this world. She and her husband move to a creepy old building with equally creepy neighbors, where she becomes consumed with paranoia and strange behavior. Peele credits this alongside another Ira Levin novel-turned-movie, The Stepford Wives, as a major inspiration for Get Out, in that both movies showed him how to hide the real horror in plain sight so that it’s so obvious nobody will see it coming.

5 Let the Right One In

     EFTI

Let the Right One In is a Swedish horror-romance that follows a young and sensitive boy, Oskar, as he forms a strong connection with his odd yet magnetic neighbor, Eli, and tries to decide if he can overlook her murderous blood drinking, elusion of sunlight, and intolerance for food.

Peele regards this as one of the most visually beautiful horror movies and recalls his favorite scene to take place when a pool full of children are murdered by Eli (charming). If that scene doesn’t haunt his dreams forever, perhaps he will weigh in on the new TV show remake of Let the Right One In on Paramount+.

4 Under the Skin

     A24

It’s not surprising when an A24 movie takes a dark and unexpected turn, but Under the Skin takes its usual antics to a new level when an extraterrestrial disguises itself as a human woman to lure in men to be used for meat in another dimension. Peele has regarded this movie highly and celebrates Johnathan Glazer’s ability to create such a captivating aesthetic. While there are many other films Jordan Peele is inspired by, among horror and many other genres, Under the Skin is so entrancing that he thinks he could watch it 100 times without ever really getting to the bottom of it.

3 The Shining

     Peregrine Productions

It’s inevitable that there’d be a Stephen King story in Jordan Peele’s top 11, from one twisted mind to another. The Shining takes the number three spot in the lineup for several reasons. Namely, the twins are creepy, and it has one of Peele’s favorite shot horror shots of all time: when Wendy (Shelley Duvall) runs away from the horrific Overlook Hotel with the knife in her hand. This scene in particular is borrowed and twisted in Peele’s Nope.

2 Nightmare on Elm Street

     New Line Cinema

Nightmare on Elm Street is Jordan Peele’s second-favorite horror movie of all time because it absolutely haunted him as a child. He believes there is no horror movie villain scarier than Freddie and because of that, only one other horror movie can rival Nightmare on Elm Street.

1 Jaws

     Universal Pictures

While Jordan Peele is a big horror fan, he won’t be caught saying Jaws isn’t debatably the best movie in any genre of all time. Jaws changed the way most Americans look at beaches, and if that isn’t horror, nothing is.