Once you’ve heard Luniz’s “I Got 5 On It” remixed for creepy trailer music, you could be forgiven for wondering why it took more than 20 years for someone to see the spooky potential there. But then again, we’re living in the post-Get Out world, in which funnyman Jordan Peele has established himself as a master craftsman of socially relevant chills, and if anyone is capable of finding scares in things the rest of us take for granted, it’s him.
After jolting the horror genre wide awake with his debut feature, Peele is turning his attention to Us, starring Winston Duke (he was M’Baku in Black Panther) and Lupita Nyong’o.
The plot details are being kept under wraps, but Peele has said that while Get Out focused on American racism, this one is about us being our own worst enemy — literally, in this case. That might explain some of the trailer’s home invasion/doppelganger tropes mashup, although it’s anyone’s guess as to what else is happening with Elizabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker. Safe money is on at least a few of these folks not making it to the end credits.
That’s about all we know.
Nyong’o revealed that Peele gave the cast 10 classics to watch in preparation: Dead Again, The Shining, The Babadook, It Follows, A Tale of Two Sisters, The Birds, Funny Games, Martyrs, Let the Right One In and The Sixth Sense. That’s a pretty unsettling movie marathon, and it shows that Peele’s swinging for the fences here. But if anyone’s capable of adding a new classic to the horror canon, it’s Jordan Peele. There’s a sentence that nobody would have anticipated reading pre-2016.
