Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th are all horror classics—and, if Jordan Peele has his way, Us will soon join them.
The first trailer for Peele’s follow-up to Get Out is here, and with this film, the writer-director had some lofty goals.
“It’s a horror film [and] I dedicated a lot of myself to create a new horror mythology, a new monster,” Peele said in Los Angeles last week. “I think that monsters and stories about monsters are one of our best ways of getting at deeper truths and facing our fears as a society.”
So what’s Peele’s monster? Here’s the trailer, which Peele calls his “eerie, creepy-arse gift” to us all this Christmas.
When the lights came up after a screening of the trailer last week, Peele ran to the front of the theatre, mimed a mic drop, then ran away. Which is appropriate for that powerhouse trailer.
“[It was] very important for me to have a black family at the center of a horror film,” Peele said. “But it’s also important to note this movie, unlike Get Out, is not about race. It is, instead, about something that I feel has become an undeniable truth: the simple fact that we are our own worst enemies.”
Peele has made this idea literal with this “creepy-arse” trailer. Peele’s horror film is a home invasion movie where the invaders are some kind of sinister doppelgängers of the family themselves. What did you think of the Us trailer? Are you worried it gives away too much?
Us, which stars Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, and Tim Heidecker, opens internationally on March 15 with no Australian release date set at the time of writing.