Jordan Peele had another successful year in the film industry, with his own Nope and his company MonkeyPaw Productions behind Adamma Ebo’s hilarious Honk For Jesus. Please save your soul. He’s adding his production eye—and his voice!—to a Halloween-themed animated film.
The trailer for the diabolical stop-motion film Wendell and Wild, starring long-running comedy team Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele as the title characters, has just been released. The film is directed by Henry Selick, best known for his work on The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline.
The film follows Kat (Lyric Ross), a 13-year-old orphan who is being freed from the juvenile justice system and enrolled in a Catholic school in her hometown. “It’s time to face your demons,” a green-eyed nun declares at the start of the trailer. Kat is haunted by Wendell (Key) and Wild (Peele), two devils that begin to control her through her dreams while she confronts her past and avoids exploitation in the present. As Kat navigates the eerie environment she’s found herself in, ghosts, monsters, exhumed corpses, and a slew of other nasty individuals emerge from the shadows. Angela Bassett, James Hong, and Natalie Martinez all appear in the film.
While the picture is clearly intended for Halloween, it is not a horror film. It also has a cheeky macabre humor. “A few of the things I don’t want to do: I don’t want to do heavy horror,” Selick told Polygon. I despise slasher movies. I despise realistic horror. But I enjoy terrifying things. And [this film] has the potential to be quite frightening. The film will be released on Netflix on October 28th.