These guys might be too busy to worry about décor. Peele is producing a new “Twilight Zone” for CBS All Access and, with Misha Green and J.J. Abrams, another anthology series for HBO based on the 2016 novel by Matt Ruff, “Lovecraft Country.” Peele’s comedy “The Last O.G.” — in which an ex-con played by Tracy Morgan adjusts to, among other things, Brooklyn gentrification — is set to start on TBS in the spring. Monkeypaw is co-producing Spike Lee’s next movie, “Black Klansman,” in which an undercover detective somehow winds up running a chapter of the K.K.K. And then there’s the diversification initiative for young writers and filmmakers working in what lots of fans and critics call “genre,” which combs the country for voices — women of color, say, or gay people — that Hollywood tends to ignore. And of course there’s Peele’s own movie.

Wandering around the house makes clear that Peele’s lean into horror and thriller and science fiction and fantasy isn’t a lean at all. It’s just Peele. Anytime I’d marvel at a picture or poster in the house, he seemed delighted that I recognized it. He recited with perfect accuracy the scariness classifications from Stephen King’s 1981 horror-culture manifesto, “Danse Macabre” — terror, horror, revulsion — and convincingly applied them to “The Blair Witch Project.” He loves Alfred Hitchcock’s films (“every single possible aspect of the cinema working in unison to bring you something new”). But also Darren Aronofsky’s bonkers crypto-Old Testament flop, “Mother!”: “I think that that movie will stand the test of time in a way that more successful movies won’t.”

Peele’s space on the top floor doubles as a mini museum of his sensibility. A tall, loaded bookshelf holds everything from screenwriting manuals and six installments of the Japanese manga landmark “Akira” to Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” to an LP of Philip Glass’s score for the underrated 1992 urban-blight horror film “Candyman.” There are encyclopedias on “early earth” and “vampire, werewolves and other monsters,” and a slender volume titled “Trolls.” “Another one of my favorites over there,” Peele said, gesturing toward a frame hanging by the door: a poster for “The Secret of NIMH,” an animated Don Bluth feature film from 1982. It’s “a weird combination of fantasy,” he said, “and kind of melancholy and some scary [expletive], but beautiful. Beautiful.”

“I’m a film geek,” he told me when we first met. And as a film geek, Peele has learned the rules for various genres — whom they include, omit and exploit and how to re-engineer it all. Earlier, Peele thought aloud about the notorious horror convention of black characters being the first to die. He believes we’ve looked at it the wrong way. The real problem, as Peele sees it, is that they don’t survive the movie at all. “Final girl” is a horror trope. “Final brother” is not. Usually, if Peele is watching a black person in a horror movie, he knows that “it’s just a matter of time until Tyrone walks away to smoke some weed or pee or something and gets macheted. It used to come right at that moment when you know everyone’s going to die. But you definitely know the final girl is not going to be the black dude.” So Kaluuya represents a correction. Now, he said, “Daniel’s the final girl.”

For a movie with this much grisliness centered around as fraught a theme as race relations in America, it’s notable that the only substantial fight about it has been one of classification: What is it? In mid-November, it was reported that “Get Out” had been submitted for Golden Globes consideration in the “musical or comedy” category, in which it’s now a nominee. Twitter — black Twitter — practically collapsed in exasperation, managing a collective SMDH. “Musical or comedy” constituted an insult, albeit an ironic one, to the historical injury the film appeared to be addressing. The dismay amounted to: What’s so funny about black pain? At the controversy’s peak, Peele tweeted simply, “It’s a documentary,” poking the beehive with characteristic waggishness. But days later, he released a statement that read, in part:

The reason for the visceral response to this movie being called a comedy is that we are still living in a time in which African-American cries for justice aren’t being taken seriously. It’s important to acknowledge that though there are funny moments, the systemic racism that the movie is about is very real. More than anything, it shows me that film can be a force for change. At the end of the day, call “Get Out” horror, comedy, drama, action or documentary, I don’t care. Whatever you call it, just know it’s our truth.

Peele told me he meant for the tweet and the statement to reflect the anguish and pride of the movie’s fans. “To me one of the greatest things about having this movie come out is we can get to this conversation that says: Who’s calling it what, and why are they calling it that?” With that “documentary” tweet, Peele was more or less saying that the movie’s genre is truth. Its other genre could be empathy. A nonwhite audience might have been Chris once, twice or all the time. But white audiences are pushed into an uncomfortable new experience. “One of the reasons this movie clicked with more than just a black audience,” Peele said, “is because you get to be black while you’re watching it.”

Blackness is the orienting principle of Peele’s art. Its richness, its strangeness, its beauty, its complication, its ridiculousness, its divisiveness, its allure, its very realness. Many a black artist has explored blackness, but few have found it as fascinating as Peele appears to. It perplexes, amuses and excites him, the way language obsesses some novelists and food delights certain cooks. Increasingly, though, he has wanted to do more for blackness — building that pipeline, for instance, through which other artists’ ideas would flow.

You can see the shift from frolic to duty in his sketch work with Keegan-Michael Key. Their Comedy Central show, “Key & Peele,” was, in some ways, a lab for “Get Out,” one in which they did as much critiquing of blackness as they did of white people’s relationship to it.