Us ticks a lot of horror boxes – zombie apocalypse, home invasion, creepy kids – without fitting neatly into any of them. Or rather, scarier versions of themselves (played by the same actors), wearing red jumpsuits, wielding gold scissors and speaking in weird voices about “the Untethering”. Early into their California beach holiday, four strangers come knocking at the door except they’re not strangers, they’re them. But that’s exactly what happens to Us’s central family, led by Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke. In this scenario, everyone has a secret double and, like Peele, we wouldn’t want to meet them. Us takes Peele’s doppelganger anecdote and runs with it.
But really Peele was committed to directing his own, original stories, mostly in the key of horror. If he’d wanted to make a Get Out sequel, he could have named his price. He was offered big superhero movies (he won’t say which ones). He was offered BlacKkKlansman, for example (he decided Spike Lee should direct it instead, and he would produce). I don’t have that fear with this movie, but of course there’s the fear of betraying the expectations of somebody who wants, essentially, Get Out 2, and what happens when they realise this is a very, very different movie.” “With Get Out, I had the fear that if it went wrong, it would go terribly wrong. “You know, it doesn’t feel too different,” he says calmly. The burden of expectation must have been unbearable. All of which makes Peele’s follow-up one of the most anticipated titles of the year. His debut, Get Out, was the crossover horror hit film-makers dream of: hugely successful commercially (more than $250m worldwide, from a budget of $4.5m), critically (including a best original screenplay Oscar for Peele last year), and culturally (witness how “ the Sunken Place” has become part of the language). Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Imagesīut horror is where Peele is at right now. Jordan Peele with the Oscar for best original screenplay in 2018.
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