The Seventh Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE SEVENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Us (2019), written and directed by Jordan Peele.

The opening text reads, “There are thousands of miles of tunnels beneath the continental United States.” This is true. And much of this underground infrastructure is abandoned. For instance, Cincinnati constructed a vast tunnel network for a subway system in the 1920’s but deserted it when funding fell through during the Great Depression. Likewise, thousands of Cold War-era nuclear fallout shelters, some large enough to accommodate entire subterranean societies, have been left to decay beneath us. Furthermore, as demonstrated in Mark Singer’s documentary Dark Days, these places are often inhabited by tunnel dwellers known as “mole people.” 

What Us posits is that such tunnels are also inhabited by millions of doppelgängers, one for every American. The doppelgängers crudely mimic our daily actions in the derelict darkness below while we happily flourish on the surface. Adelaide (played by Lupita Nyong'o) discovers this as a child in the 1980’s when she wanders away from her parents to explore a funhouse mirror maze (which as we've seen is the doppelgänger’s native habitat). Inside she encounters her double, who has simultaneously wandered away from her own duplicate parents and up into the maze. Adelaide thus becomes a changeling. This incident eventually sets off a revolution, wherein all the doppelgängers emerge and murder their more fortunate twins with scissors. The second phase of their invasion then involves completing the human chain promised by Hands Across America in 1986. This actual charity campaign had the goal of “ending poverty” in the US, somehow ...

Us is Peele’s second film after his wildly successful debut Get Out, for which he received the Best Screenplay Oscar as well as Best Picture and Best Director nominations. So, naturally critics compared Us to Get Out upon release. Whereas Get Out uses horror to create a starkly explicit exploration of the dynamics of race in America (and is probably the best instance of such ever made), Us expands in focus to tackle inequality between all classes, through much more allegorical means. Us is a Twilight Zone-like parable in which people who are identical to us are forced to suffer in the netherworld while we enjoy the daylight in blissful ignorance of their plight (incidentally, Peele’s love of Rod Sterling’s classic series was confirmed when he produced and hosted a brief revival show in 2020). Thus, Us’s doppelgängers represent the working poor, undocumented migrants, and every other oppressed group that the middle and upper classes depend on for their lives but leave to die in miserable corners so they don’t have to look at. Us faced initial criticism for being “unrealistic,” which I think came from the expectation that like Get Out it was supposed to take place in a thoroughly grounded reality. It should have been clear, though, that the intention with Us was rather to have its strongly believable middle-class family cross over into a surreal territory where allegorical meaning holds as much sway as the laws of nature. And it accomplishes this masterfully, particularly in the first half, with beautifully crafted sequences of perfectly-timed eeriness that alternate with genuine moments of comedy. Viewed independently of both Peele’s own prior work and the standard molds of modern cinema, Us succeeds as an original and evocative work of weird fiction. 

“Too many twins!” Adelaide’s daughter exclaims at one point—to bring us back to our theme, TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS. Obviously, Us stands foremost among doppelgänger horror films in recent years. And many of the doppelgänger motifs we’ve already discussed make an appearance here, including the changeling plot, the appearance of real-life identical twins alongside artificially devised duplicates, the symbolic use of masks, and (again) the funhouse labyrinth. But with Us, we can at last introduce the idea that doppelgängers are not merely lone hunters but in fact derive from an entire subspecies of mirror entities, one for each of us—a subspecies that lives in the dismal darkness of the underworld, that blames us for its fallen state, and that thus plots to kill us and replace us in the light.