Jordan Peele's Next Project Is a Jim Crow- Era HBO Horror Series

Following up a little movie you’ve never heard of called Get Out, Jordan Peele is working on another horror project dealing with race and it’s an HBO anthology series set in the 1950s.

The hour-long drama, Lovecraft Country, is being adapted from author Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel and, according to The Hollywood Reporter, “described as an anthological horror series that reclaims genre storytelling from the African-American perspective.”

The protagonist in the story is Atticus Turner, a 25-year-old black Korean War vet who travels through Jim Crow Era Chicago to find his missing dad, with help from his Uncle George and his friend Letitia. The source material is clearly in Peele’s wheelhouse—a novel with a title and concept that’s a direct reference to a sci-fi author (H.P. Lovecraft) whose white supremacist beliefs bled into his work. (L.A. Review of Books wrote that the book questions, “how do the fictional tentacular monsters of Lovecraft compare to the very real horrors of racism that to this day echo through history and shape the modern era?”)

Underground writer Misha Green is writing the HBO script, and Peele is working in partnership with Warner Bros Television and J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot. Peele’s ability to generate millions of dollars on a small budget also recently helped him land a deal with Universal Pictures for his production company Monkeypaw.