Breaking News Emails
Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Dec. 25, 2018 / 8:10 PM GMT
By Kalhan Rosenblatt
Christmas Day went from holiday cheer to holiday fear with the release of the trailer for director Jordan Peele’s latest horror film “Us” on Tuesday.
Peele, who won an Oscar for his scary 2017 feature debut “Get Out,” tweeted the first look at the film on Tuesday morning, telling viewers, “Here we go.”
“For my second feature, I wanted to create a monster mythology,” Peele told Entertainment Weekly on Thursday.
The film stars Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke as Adelaide and Gabe Wilson, who take their children to Adelaide’s childhood beach house in Northern California for the summer, according to EW. Adelaide becomes increasingly paranoid about her family’s well-being as she is haunted by a past trauma.
During a night at the family home, as is shown in the trailer, four figures appear at the foot of the driveway, which appears to be the moment horror is unleashed upon the Wilson family.
The monsters, it seems, are the Wilsons themselves.
Peele’s “Get Out” was a social thriller centered on black identity and white racism in the United States, and allowed audiences to feel the strangeness and trepidation that actor Daniel Kaluuya’s character Chris, who is black, experienced while spending time with the family of his girlfriend, Allison Williams’ character Rose, who is white.
Erik Davis, managing editor at Fandango, tweeted that he had previewed the trailer with Peele, and quoted the director as saying, “It’s important to note that this movie, unlike Get Out, is not about race. Instead it’s about something I feel has become an undeniable truth — that is the simple fact that we are our own worst enemies.”
The official Twitter for “Us” appeared to echo that sentiment.
“We are our own worst enemy,” a tweet with the official trailer read, calling the film Peele’s “new nightmare.”
Shortly after Peele debuted the trailer, several trends began to overtake Christmas Day phrases on Twitter, including Peele, Nyong’o and Duke’s names, and the song “I Got 5 On It” by the hip-hop group Luniz, which is featured throughout the trailer as it becomes progressively more menacing.
“Us” premieres on March 15, 2019.
