There was a time when Jordan Peele was known for doing the best Barack Obama impression on television. 2017’s Get Out turned him into Hollywood’s modern mythmaker, Rod Serling reincarnate, a cinematic craftsman with a surgeon’s hand for extracting social commentary from horrific scenarios. He’s aware of the new weight on his shoulders, which accumulated after Get Out’s tremendous success led to a flurry of new projects, including the Oscar-winning BlacKkKlansman, HBO’s upcoming Lovecraft Country, a reboot of Candyman directed by Nia DaCosta, and next month’s reboot of The Twilight Zone.
Around the time his creative passion expanded into a roaring show business empire, Peele had his first child with wife Chelsea Peretti. He couldn’t do it all alone; juggling the responsibilities as Hollywood’s purveyor of society-piercing horror meant expanding his company, Monkeypaw Productions. “We put together a team that I can trust with maintaining the course of these other projects while I’m in the directing space,” he told Polygon during a stop in New York.
Yes, during his transformation from sketch comedian into singular storyteller, Peele found time to conceive, script, shoot, and gift audiences a new mind-bender. Us, which hits theaters this week, is an unequivocal horror movie, splicing slasher scares and creature feature reveals as it plunges headfirst into America’s dark soul. Speaking to Polygon, Peele delved into how he landed on Us’ mesh of ideas and the personal influences that helped prevent him from repeating Get Out.
[Ed. note: This interview contains minor spoilers for Us.]
Polygon: You worked on the screenplay for Get Out over many years. Did Us have a similar journey, or did this emerge in the wake of that film’s success?
Jordan Peele: When I was doing the Oscar campaign for Get Out, it sort of took me out of the creative process for several months. Us really got creatively going in full after that, last March, about a year ago. It turns out I can make a movie from start to finish in about a year, although a lifetime of imagery was tapped for it.
You’ve said Twilight Zone had a major influence on the film, but was that the genesis of the story?
Yeah, I saw [an episode] when I was a kid called “Mirror Image.” There’s something about this idea that the doppelganger that has this creepy smile ... they know more than you know. I was sort of connecting that to, first and foremost, our fear — our societal fear — of terrorism, of an attack, of an invader coming in who has been plotting something mysterious. Besides the fact that this is an awful event is the idea that there is a well-oiled plan. And the only other thing that’s more terrifying than that is the suppressed feelings of what our part in these tragedies is, even if we are the victim.
The movie starts in 1985 with a young Adelaide mesmerized by a Hands Across America commercial. The TV’s surrounded by VHS tapes. Is there a biographical side of this movie?
Very much so. And I realize, only after making this movie, how much television comes up as a theme in both Get Out and this. I watched a ton of television as a kid. Old creepy commercials also come up in both, ones from the ’80s. In conceiving this movie, I arrived at the Hands Across America commercial from one of these moments of feeling as opposed to thinking. I found a real Hands Across America commercial — I don’t know what I was searching to find it, but I just had this feeling of dread watching the amusing, bright optimism on display. It took me back to a time where I was also afraid and young and vulnerable, and didn’t really know what was going on. So I probably said, what if this was the first scene in the movie? And that began to answer questions about what I was working towards.
I’m now thinking of the shared terror that Room 237 director Rodney Ascher documented in The S from Hell, about the ’60s-era Screen Gems logo, and even the rise of vaporwave. What about standard-def TV imagery is so haunting? Why did it belong in this movie?
There was a very sort of specific duality of the ’80s where television that I was watching had this sincere-but-hollow sense of optimism and goodness. It was the Reagan era, which was kind of like this return to those ’50s ideals. And now we’re back to that. But that sort of the sitcom, “aw shucks” thing, when juxtaposed with the fears of the Cold War, the wealth disparity, and the Challenger disaster, and these kinds of things, was just, as a kid, I knew something was fucked up.
There’s also a CHUD tape next to the TV in that scene, which tells you more about Us than you realize at that moment.
Fun fact: My first girlfriend’s father directed CHUD, when I was, like, 11 or 12 or something like that. Her father was Douglas Cheek. So that was my introduction to CHUD. So there’s a little personal thing for me.
You’ve talked about how Us was a chance to cut through some of the interpretable genre murkiness that surrounded Get Out, but how much of that had to do with people seeing the movie as a black story? And do you rectify that by both tapping overt horror tropes and trying to make Us less about race?
There are a lot of hurdles with that. The biggest hurdle is with yourself as a creator. It’s easy to get distracted by the fact that a black family in a scene can conjure different ideas and thoughts than their white counterparts in the same scene. As much as the point of [Us] is setting out to make a movie where it’s not about race, America is about race. It’s always about race. So you can’t really get away from that and people’s experience of the film.
I think it only highlights how important it is that we try and forge into the territory where a black family is just a black family and that’s it. I think one of the things about this movie that makes it an even trickier one to pull off — a movie that’s “not about race” — is that the word “us” is subjective and ambiguous. It can mean anything. If a black person were to watch this movie and have the experience of how “us” means black people, I can’t take away that experience. All I wanted to put into place was the simple notion that for every “us” there is a “them.” And that whoever the “us” is that you identify with, there is a way we relate to them.
There’s a shot in the movie of blood splattering across an Alexa-like home assistant. Is technology part of your grand comment on “for every us, there’s a them”?
Honestly, it’s not a theme I thought about in great depth in terms of this movie. I think about privilege and pushing the boundaries of what we can make and what we can afford. There’s definitely a theme of control — population control, mind control — that I think is connected to this idea of technology, and it’s one of the ways that the monster that is money and currency sort of wags the dog.
Splattering blood on Alexa is also something we haven’t seen in a horror movie before, because it could only happen in this modern era. Are you looking for those urgent opportunities? Trying to make a movie that isn’t timeless?
You want to make something that’s distinctly now, because that’s the best way to signal to an audience, this is a movie that couldn’t be made last year, so you have to see it now. I love that energy. Then you realize that the timeless element may end up being the reasons the themes are universal and the commentary on humanity, but it will also have a chance to become like a iconic snapshot of this time, like some of my favorite movies. Like The Birds — Hitchcock is one of my favorites, and he’s very specific. What Psycho did at the time subverted what anyone was ready for. Psycho is as dark as the darkest moments of Us. He was, in terms of pushing the boundaries, exploring the darkness of the human condition.
Us gets a little gorier.
There’s certainly a section of this movie where I wanted to make it clear to the audience, this is a horror film and I’m inviting you to have a voyeurism and a fun time in one of the darkest things that you can imagine.
Without revealing too much, Us takes some major twists and reveals a vast world beneath the surface of the invasion thriller premise. How much of that mythology did you build out so that you could show slivers of it?
Everything. I have the entire mythology of this world because the audience can tell if you don’t. The choice becomes how much of that mythology do you reveal. The line that I’m exploring in this movie is a very difficult line. Some people might want less explanation. Some people might want more explanation. I’m trying to serve whatever your appetite is, but ultimately I’m trying to give enough context to be able to discuss and hypothesize about more. When it’s all wrapped up neatly and perfectly, it alleviates the fear. I don’t want to do it.
Could you see yourself returning to the Us-verse in a sequel or something parallel?
Sure! It’s a fun one. There’s a lot going on there. The “Us-verse” ... I like that.
Us will be released March 22 in theaters.