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Jordan Peele’s Us Will Reportedly Be a Monster Mythology

Details about Jordan Peele’s next horror film are slim, but he’s already serving a serious mood. We got chills from the first poster and don’t even really know why yet. If the image is any indicator, Us is going to do to scissors what Get Out did to teacups. Take a mundane object and terrify us with it. The project is still shrouded in mystery, but Entertainment Weekly is starting to unravel the secrets with amazing new images from the film.

The major question right now is, what exactly is Us? According to Peele, it is a ‘monster mythology.’ We may be getting ahead of ourselves, but a mythology constructed by Peele sounds like an entire franchise in the making. One of the most powerful forces in horror is lore and whether or not the things we fear should even be believed. To have a new legend introduced is beyond exciting.

Here’s the setup as described by Piya Sinha-Roy with EW: The story is set in the present day and follows Adelaide and Gabe Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke) as they take their kids to Adelaide’s old childhood beachside home in Northern California for the summer. After a day at the beach with the Tyler family (which includes Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker), Adelaide — who’s haunted by a lingering trauma from her past — becomes increasingly more paranoid that something bad will happen to her family. As night falls, the Wilsons see four figures holding hands and standing silently at the bottom of their driveway.

Holy cow. One of the two new images shows those four creepy figures, who look a lot like the family only terrifying. No one from the film has said exactly that they are the monsters. However, EW reveals that the monsters are called the Tethered. Are they tethered to each other, to another dimension, or to the family? Perhaps that answer could be the key to defeating them.

The other new photo features a dirty and tattered Nyong’o in handcuffs wielding a small baton in a creepy staircase. Us appears to be holding nothing back. It’s interesting that the film is so secretive, but one of the first images we get to see is an action shot. Horror movies are often protective of what happens after things start to go wrong. Peele never fails to intrigue.

Nyong’o was assigned homework for the role that we are super envious of. Peele assigned her to watch the ultimate starter pack in horror movie fandom: Dead AgainThe ShiningThe BabadookIt FollowsA Tale of Two SistersThe BirdsFunny GamesMartyrsLet the Right One In, and The Sixth Sense. Sign us up for that job.

Us unravels in theaters March 15.

Featured Image: “Us.” Courtesy of Universal Pictures. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kelle Long

Kelle has written about film and TV for The Credits since 2016. Follow her on Twitter @molaitdc for interviews with really cool film and TV artists and only occasional outbursts about Broadway, tennis, and country music. Please no talking or texting during the movie. Unless it is a musical, then sing along loudly.

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