If you were worried that Jordan Peele forgot to give you a present this year, don’t worry: Like a husband in a car commercial, he just waited until Christmas morning to unveil his Yuletide surprise. It’s the first trailer for his upcoming horror film Us, which stars Winston Duke and an American-accented Lupita Nyong’o as parents haunted by some ultrafreaky home invaders … who just so happen to look exactly like them. (Hence the title.) There’s a terrifying incident at the beach, a sinister reinterpretation of Luniz’s 1995 hit “I Got 5 on It,†and at some point, poor Elisabeth Moss gets well-acquainted with a pair of scissors. If you were one of those people who thought that Get Out wasn’t scary enough, this may be the movie for you.
In a brief introduction before the trailer screened for journalists last week, Peele explained that while it was important for him to have a black family at the center of the film, the movie’s not “about†race per se. Rather, he said, it’s an effort at creating “a new horror mythology, and a new monster.â€
“Stories about monsters are one of our best ways of getting at deeper truths and facing our fears as a society,†Peele said. What sort of deeper truths? Per the director, Us is “about something that’s become an undeniable fact: the simple truth that we are our own worst enemies.â€
Us premieres March 15.