Leave it to Jordan Peele to make even the clichés in trailers seem fresh. After giving horror conventions new dimensionality in Get Out, Peele released a provocative first trailer on Christmas Day for his follow-up, Us, which features as its soundtrack a slow, creepy version of a familiar pop song. The song? “I Got 5 On It†by Luniz, which transforms from a mid-‘90s hip-hop banger into a haunting series of arpeggios hinting at the frightening violence yet to come from the film.
Peele first presented the trailer to a small group of reporters a week before its debut on Tuesday. “I’m so honored that you would come to this,†he said in a brief greeting. “How do you introduce a trailer? It’s a very good question. It’s an introduction to the movie itself.â€The film stars Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Shahadi Wright Joseph, and Evan Alex as a family who returns from vacation to discover their own doppelgängers surrounding their home. Exactly what that means for them has yet to be revealed but it certainly promises some incredible thrills. “It was very important for me was to have a black family at the center of a horror film,†Peele explained in his introduction. “But it’s also important to note, this movie, unlike Get Out, is not about race. It is instead about something that I feel has become an undeniable truth, and that is the simple fact that we are our own worst enemies.â€Get Out was not just a runaway hit at the box office but an eventual Best Picture Oscar nominee thanks to its sophisticated, scary, and incisive story. Peele indicated this new film was at least in part an exercise for him to create the kind of horror mythology that first inspired him as a moviegoer, using its most nightmarish creations as a stand-in for humankind’s biggest fears and foibles. “I dedicated a lot of myself to create a new horror mythology, and a new monster,†he said. “I think that monsters and stories about monsters are one of our best ways of getting at deeper truths and facing our fears as a society.â€Us arrives in theaters March 15, 2019.Images: Universal