Exclusive: Watch Jordan Peele explain the terrifying duality of scissors in Us movie
Mundane household object or murder weapon? Scissors have always wielded the power to flit between the two, and it’s that duality that captured Jordan Peele’s imagination when he chose to use gold scissors as part of the central imagery for his latest horror, Us.
“There’s a duality to scissors — a whole made up of two parts but also they lie in this territory between the mundane and the absolutely terrifying,” Peele explains in an exclusive clip to EW.
Us, Peele’s anticipated follow-up to 2017’s Get Out hitting theaters March 22, follows the Wilsons (Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Shahadi Wright Joseph, and Evan Alex), as their idyllic California beach vacation is interrupted by a shadowy family that turns out to be their doppelgangers called The Tethered. Scissors are the main weapon of the underground-dwelling Tethered, who seek cold justice from their above-ground counterparts.
A close-up of golden shears clasped in the gloved hands of Nyong’o is a central visual in the promotional material for Us, and Peele sent similar scissors to journalists in December for the release of the new trailer. At the time, Peele told EW that using white rabbits and scissors throughout his film was deliberate: “They’re both scary things to me, and both inane things, so I love subverting and bringing out the scariness in things you wouldn’t necessarily associate with that.”
