Jordan Peele’s highly anticipated follow-up to Get Out has been shrouded in mystery for most of 2018, and now that we’ve finally got our first proper trailer for next year’s Us, we find ourselves with more questions than ever.
Thankfully, when the preview screened to a room full of journalists in Los Angeles last week, Peele provided a little more context on his upcoming flick, explaining how he intended to address the horror that lies within us all.
“Very important for me was to have a black family at the center of a horror film,” Peele said. “But it’s also important to note, unlike Get Out, Us is not about race. It is instead about something that I feel has become an undeniable truth. And that is the simple fact that we are our own worst enemies.”
This idea is seen to be very literal in the new trailer, which shows the Wilson family under assault from their own violent doppelgängers. And while it’s still unclear just what exactly these mysterious assailants are, Peele claims that his film will offer a new mythology that provides thoughtful context on its monsters.
“I dedicated a lot of myself to create a new horror mythology and a new monster,” Peele said. “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.”
Us stars Lupita Nyong’o as Adelaide Wilson, a woman haunted by her traumatic past, in a story that sees Adelaide and her husband Gabe (Winston Duke) take a holiday with the kids at her childhood beachside home. After spending the day with the Tylers (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker), our leads notice four figures standing silently at the bottom of their driveway, and as you’ve likely seen from the trailer, things get pretty weird from there.
How exactly the various bunny rabbits and a blood-soaked man with a pair of scissors factor into the story remain questions for another time, but it certainly looks like Peele is making good on his previous claim that he “wanted to do something that was more firmly in the horror genre,” while still holding onto his love of movies that are “twisted but fun.” We’ll find out if Us can live up to some daunting expectations when the film hits theaters on March 15th, 2019.
