Jordan Peele Talks How The Current "Dark Time" & The "Fear Of The Outsider" Influenced 'Us'

In the first moments of the “Get Out” trailers, it was clear that writer-director Jordan Peele was using common horror/thriller tropes to put across a message about race. Ultimately, the film became a massive hit, in no small part to the strong themes, and anticipation built for what the filmmaker had up his sleeve next. However, when you watch the trailers for “Us,” the obvious social messages seem to be replaced by straight up terrifying, horrific imagery. But according to the director, don’t be fooled – there’s still a strong social message buried beneath that scary exterior.

“The thing I didn’t feel we were talking about in any substantive manner was race. With this one, I asked myself, ‘What are we not ready to talk about now?’ And the answer for me was, ‘What is my part in this mess?’” says the filmmaker in a new interview with the WSJ. Magazine.

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He continues, “We’re living in a messy time. A dark time. And I think there’s plenty of blame to go around, but what I don’t see happening enough is people looking at their own part in this dark turn. It’s so much easier to blame the other. It connects to something in human nature, and to a duality in the history and present of this country as well: this fear of the outsider. This movie was a way to say, what if the intruder is us? Maybe the monster has our face, and we’re so obsessed with some unrecognizable monster that we’ve been blinded to the real one.”

While the filmmaker has gone on record saying that “Us” was still one of his “social thriller” films like “Get Out,” he’s also said that his goal with this new film is to make a true horror movie. But it appears that the same strong themes and underlying messages that made “Get Out” rise above the other crop of thrillers will be just as present in “Us.”

And with his theme in his mind, he thought about which type of horror film would fit this idea. Clearly, if you’ve seen the trailer for “Us,” the film is firmly established in the home invasion subgenre of horror. According to Peele, this is all for a reason.

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“Invasion movies—whether it’s a home invasion or ‘The Birds’ or UFOs—pull from fear of the outsider. Right now we’re in a time where that fear is very thick in the zeitgeist: fear of North Korea making a bomb, fear of immigrants. But we’re realizing that the terror is homegrown, too,” Peele explains.

“Writing this movie, I thought a lot about 9/11. Where we are now as a culture is very connected to that scar,” he elaborates. “In the most literal ways: There’s discussion of banning people from entering this country that’s this residual trauma from that day. We have values that we claim this country is about, but we have a dark side that is the opposite of those values. I wanted to channel some of that dark space: to say that you can have invading others that are truly resorting to evil means, but if we’re not asking how we got ourselves here, from all angles, we’re doomed to rinse and repeat.”

We are merely a couple weeks away from seeing Peele’s latest film, and now, with this new information, it’s clear that the filmmaker has put just as much thought and intelligence in “Us” as he did with his Oscar-winning debut. We’ll just have to wait and see if the overall quality of his latest matches his debut, as well. At this point, it seems like he’s got yet another home run on his hands.