Jordan Peele established himself as a director to follow in a big way with his 2017 film Get Out. For his follow-up, Jordan Peele is again making a horror film but this time he is upping the ante. With Us, Jordan Peele wanted to make a movie that was way scarier than Get Out and was pure horror. In his own words, he explained his thought process for making Us:
I’m such a horror nut that the genre confusion of Get Out broke my heart a little. I set out to make a horror movie, and it’s kind of not a horror movie. As a horror fan, I really wanted to contribute something to that world.
As far as Jordan Peele is concerned, he didn’t really contribute to the horror movie genre with Get Out despite setting out to-- as he told Rolling Stone. Get Out blended horror elements and social commentary into what many dub a ‘social thriller’ as opposed to a pure horror movie. So with Us, he wanted to do what he didn’t the first time and make a movie that was unambiguously horror.
It’s interesting that Jordan Peele says that Get Out’s genre confusion broke his heart, but it’s unclear if he began to view it as not a horror movie after the fact or if the process of crafting the film began to transform the acclaimed project. Whatever the case, Jordan Peele still felt the need to leave his mark on the horror genre and the result of that is Us.
And as a pure horror movie, Us is intended to be way scarier than Get Out. The intention is that you have a visceral reaction, jumping out of your seat in fear with Us as opposed to the existential, but internalized dread of Get Out. This time around, fans of Get Out are in for a shockingly horrific awakening if they are expecting Us to be cut from the same cloth as Peele’s debut.
Us see’s the family of Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke’s characters terrorized by their dopplegängers during a family trip to the beach. Jordan Peele calls the dopplëgangers the Tethered, and he views them as monsters that could stand alongside Universal's Dracula, the Wolfman, etc. Unlike Get Out, Us is not a commentary about race, but is simply a horror movie that happens to feature a black family-- which is unique in and of itself.
As if anticipation for Us wasn’t high already, Jordan Peele’s aim to make this a pure horror film should get people even more excited. Get Out was brilliant, but it was more of a psychological thriller with scary moments. But it wasn’t really a scary movie. Us on the other hand looks truly nightmarish, like it will have you peeking through your fingers and fearful to go to sleep at night and it sounds like that was very much by design.
Us opens in theaters on March 22. For all of 2019’s biggest movies, check out our release schedule.
