Jordan Peele breaks down the frightening first Us trailer
Forget about the Sunken Place — are you ready to meet The Tethered?
The new trailer for Jordan Peele’s Us delivered Christmas Day chills on Tuesday, showing a holiday from hell for the Wilson family, in which Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), Gabe (Winston Duke) and their children come under attack from shadowy figures.
At first, we see the Wilsons traveling up the Northern California coast in summer to Adelaide’s old childhood beachside home, as Gabe bops along to Luniz’s “I Got 5 On It.” Soon, we see the Wilsons relaxing on the beach with another family, the Tylers (which includes Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker), but Adelaide has a sense of unease, especially when her young son wanders off and finds a man standing statue-like on the beach.
That night, as the Wilsons get ready for bed, they see four people holding hands and dressed in red, standing silently at the bottom of their driveway. As Gabe walks out with a baseball bat and asks “If you wanna get crazy, we can get crazy,” craziness breaks out — the shadowy masked figures suddenly descend on the house, trapping the Wilsons.
The trailer reveals a big plot twist about the creepy figures dressed in red — they are The Tethered, doppelgängers of the Wilson family. The film puts Nyong’o, Duke, and the two children, Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex, in dual roles as the Wilsons come under attack from their counterparts — in one scene, Nyong’o sits in a chair with a pair of scissors, emitting a very distorted, bone-chilling laugh.
As part of EW’s exclusive first look into Us, Peele broke down the new trailer and revealed more about the inspirations for his newest fright-fest.
Who are The Tethered?
I think the main idea that went into writing this film is that we’re our own worst enemy, and that idea created this monster, The Tethered. I wanted to forge this new mythology that explored our duality and the duality of the characters. To the actors, I knew this was the ultimate fun because who doesn’t want to play two roles in a movie; when you’re tired in one, you get to jump into the other. But I think what was a fun challenge for actors, was finding the connections between the characters and their counterparts.
What was the significance of the rabbits and scissors imagery?
I’m a filmmaker and film-lover that loves iconic imagery and what it could mean. When we talk about the scissors and the rabbits, for every choice like that, there are several different reasons that clicked to me but the first test that anything passed was the genre test. So does it conjure the horror genre to me, which is a limitation that I feel very dedicated to working within. I think rabbits and scissors, 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.
Talk about your ideas for the Wilson Family?
I can’t think of a horror movie of this nature with a family in the center of it that uses a black family. So I knew just by putting an African-American family in the lead role, already we would be exploring cinematic uncharted territory – and I apologize if I’m missing something, which I probably am. I love films like Poltergeist, I love The Shining, The Amityville Horror and I love Amblin films, those Spielberg films that brought extraordinary situations to a family unit, and even though this movie is not about race, I felt like it was an important piece of the project to have a black family in the center. Get Out was one missing piece of the racial conversation and this is another one and we’re seeing a lot of great strides being taken by great artists like Ava (Duvernay) and Ryan (Coogler).
Us is set to hit theaters March 15, 2019.
