Jordan Peele lists his scary influences, from 'The Shining' to 'Jaws'

Jordan Peele figures his favorite films are basically a “pretty predictable” top 20 of the greats — Alien, Halloween, E.T., the usual.

The lifelong horror fan’s goal of directing his own film comes true with Get Out (in theaters Friday) — a dream the former Key & Peele star harbored as a teen growing up in New York City — and he's gone from fan to student of these iconic movies.

Here are five that have influenced Peele as a rookie filmmaker:

'Rosemary’s Baby' (1968)

Chris, the African-American protagonist of Get Out, is forced into an uncomfortable situation when he meets his white girlfriend’s parents. Peele took cues from Roman Polanski’s terrifying classic, in which Mia Farrow's pregnant character is surrounded by odd neighbors, as well as 1975's The Stepford Wives, in that the villains are men. “The fact that those movies work for me, a man, so well is proof to me that people could just experience the world through Chris’ eyes for an hour and a half.”

'Misery' (1990)

“Misery is a movie where the unlikely villain turns out to be the scariest,” Peele says of the thriller, which cast James Caan as a famous author and Kathy Bates as his torturing fan. “But it’s also a movie where the acting and the performance and the script and the dialogue is where the fear in the movie lies. I love that kind of technique.”

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'The Shining' (1980)

While Stanley Kubrick’s cerebral classic had some of the “scariest scares of just about any movie,” Peele says, the magic is its "subtlety, an attention to almost a subconscious level of perception of something creepy going on. It’s just unsettling and I don’t think anyone’s really done a horror movie that well since.”

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'Gremlins' (1984)

The horror comedy is one of the reasons the PG-13 rating was instituted, because nasty creatures getting microwaved and thrown into a blender was a little much for PG audiences. When Peele saw it as a 5-year-old, "it hit for me on a horror level and on a fun, entertaining level as well," he says. “The fact that we really questioned the whole fabric of what was OK for kids and what wasn’t really means that there’s a movie that was doing something new and pushing the boundaries of genre."

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'Jaws' (1975)

“The most beautiful revelation with Jaws was the audience’s imagination is far more powerful than what you show them,” says Peele. Steven Spielberg infamously had issues with mechanical sharks while filming the blockbuster, and what most impressed Peele is how the filmmaker developed other ways to engage an audience rather than showing a man-eating fish. “It changes the way we think of how to tell the story of a monster.”