By In 2017, Jordan Peele hit a moonshot with his directorial debut with horror psycho-thriller Get Out. Up to then, Peele was viewed as a comedy guru with his time on Key & Peele and Keanu before dropping a surprising horror movie that was both entertaining while making potent points towards society in America. All through the eyes of a young man and some somnolent tapping on a teacup.
Initially slated for a March 15th release, news broke that the film has been pushed back a week and will make its official premiere at South by Southwest as the opening night film. SXSW’s Director of Film Janet Pierson shared their joy of being able to start the festival with Peele’s new film: “We are crazy excited to world premiere the most anticipated film of 2019 from the creative powerhouse that brought us Get Out. We honestly couldn’t imagine a more perfect film to kick off the 2019 SXSW Film Festival.”
It didn’t take long for Peele to enact his next vision, as Us continues the director’s affinity for psychological thrillers with horror-based roots. In Us, a vacationing family revisits their wife and mother’s childhood home. Haunted by an unresolved and unexplainable past, her paranoia is fully formed when four strangers show up at night with the faces of herself and her family.
Peele’s choice to take what he sees in today’s society and implement those cultural discussions into his films is what helped make Get Out the success it was. In an interview with Business Insider back in 2017, Peele made it clear that this is a planned process, saying “the scariest monster in the world is human beings and what we are capable of, especially when we get together. I’m working on these premises about these different social demons. These innately human monsters that have been woven into the fabric of how we think and how we interact. Each one of my movies is going to be about one of these different social demons.”
Us hits theaters on March 22nd.
