Us by Jordan Peele

Doppelgängers have been trailing Jordan Peele for decades. The 40-year-old Oscar-winning writer-director-producer behind Get Out and the upcoming film Us, this year’s SXSW phenomenon, spent a few years in upstate New York when he was a student at Sarah Lawrence College. Every time he exited the midnight train into Bronxville, he’d brace himself—imagining he was about to see his mirror image looking back at him, walking the opposite direction into the tunnel from which he had just emerged

“It was one of these nightmarish things, that creepy feeling of, I’ve got to get out of here because I don’t know what is coming,” said the director after the raucous debut of his latest film, during a group interview in Austin alongside his two leads, Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke.

The Twilight Zone—a classic paranormal series Peele recently rebooted for CBS All Access—played in heavy rotation in his home, Peele said. But he was particularly influenced by a 1960 episode titled “Mirror Image,” starring Vera Miles and Martin Milner. He was never able to rid himself of the primal fear its doppelgänger mythology induced, which got him wondering: why is this sort of terror so visceral? When it comes to doubles, what are we so afraid of?

His conclusion was that self-examination may be the scariest monster of all. “It led me to this thing that we don’t look at ourselves,” Peele said. “It’s too hard for us to look at ourselves, both as individuals and as a group.”

Peele’s new film, which left Austin audiences both terrified and perplexed at its world premiere Friday night, centers on the Wilson family and their ill-fated vacation to Santa Cruz—the sleepy beachfront community that was the site of childhood trauma for Adelaide (Nyong’o’s character). That incident comes back to haunt the family’s matriarch and her brood when a family of four replicants show up on their driveway. Dressed in red jumpsuits and armed with nefarious intentions, this foursome isn’t looking for a dinner invite. Rather, “the tethered,” as Peele calls them, have returned to reclaim what’s theirs, having grown fed up with serving as the slavish shadows of our well-meaning protagonists.

Peele has a lot to say in the film, both about who we are as human beings and specifically who we are as Americans. But he’s also happy to play homage to his favorite horror films from his childhood, including the 1980s vampire flick The Lost Boys—which was also set in this coastal California town—and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and Vertigo, two films tethered to the Bay Area of northern California. He was also looking to put something on the screen that we hadn’t seen before.

“I want to see a black family on the beach, goddammit!” he said with a bit of a laugh. “I want to see a black family buy a boat. That happens. And we’ve never seen it.”

It’s a sentiment that Duke—whose hapless American dad, Gabe, is a far cry from M’Baku, his herculean character from Black Panther—was happy to help depict. “It’s really interesting and beautiful to define what the all-American family looks like, and what it should look like when it comes through representation,” the actor said. “They could both be terrifying and something to aspire to.”

Unbridled terror comes through in many ways in Us—but no one in the film is scarier than Nyong’o herself, who had trouble articulating how she views her two characters. She could, however, easily describe how she embodied them. Playing two versions of the same woman—one graceful and maternal, the other guttural and rabid—the Oscar-winning actress navigated her duality by taking dance classes and then making that elegance look monstrous.

“With the red character, Jordan used two words: queen and cockroach,” said Nyong’o. “They were such dissonant ideas, but there’s a stillness to both. Queens are often very regal, and they rule with just their energy. With cockroaches, there’s always an element of surprise.”

“And they are both survivors,” added Peele, before launching into praise for his leading lady.

“When I was watching this [with the audience], I was stricken,” he said. “Lupita does Ripley [Alien], she does Clarice Starling, and she does Hannibal Lecter [both from Silence of the Lambs] in one movie. It’s crazy.”

Nyong’o also plays off her Black Panther co-star and former Yale classmate Duke with an ease that gives a grateful audience a moment to breathe, while Duke brings much-needed levity.

“[At that screening,] Winston got more laughs than I’ve ever gotten in my professional career in comedy. This is not fair. It’s not fair,” said Peele. “There was a rhythm between the two that allowed the other one to sing and go even further. Lupita is constantly cranking up the tension in this movie. Whether it’s in the Adelaide role or the Red role, she is cranking the audience up. Winston’s the release valve to that. And both of them are needed.”

Following the screening Friday night, Peele expanded on the heavier thematic elements to the film in an audience-led Q&A: “We are in a time where we fear the other, whether it’s the mysterious invader who might kill us or take our jobs, or the faction that doesn’t live near us that votes differently than we did. Maybe the evil is us. Maybe the monster that we’re looking at has our face.”

It’s a sentiment Peele examines from different angles in Us. There is a Hands Across America motif that recurs throughout the film, serving as another reminder of the duality Peele is examining via his heroes and villains: “Hands Across America was this idea of American optimism and hope, and Ronald Reagan-style-we-can-get-things-done-if-we-just-hold-hands,” he said of the 1986 benefit event, which saw 6.5 million people link arms across the continental United States.

“It’s a great gesture—but you can’t actually cure hunger and all that,” he added, saying that the charity initiative coincided with darker images both personally and culturally. “That was when I was afraid of horror movies. That’s when the Challenger disaster happened. There are several 80s images that conjure up a feeling of both bliss and innocence, and also the darkest of the dark.”

In the end, that’s what Peele is really exploring in Us: that every good side, every positive development both in our country collectively and to us individually, comes at the expense of someone else’s suffering, whether we realize it or not. That may be a human trait—but to Peele, it’s also particularly American.

“I wanted to say something about the state of this country. It’s the one I live in. It’s the one I know best, and it’s the one that I have the most complicated pride and simultaneous guilt about being from,” he said.

“We live in a country that is about every man is created equal, and [yet] it's built on the backs of genocide. It's built on bloody soil. In the very DNA of this country, there are great ideas, and there are the worst horrors that humans can create. Genocide, rape, slavery. So I feel like if I’m going to accept the privilege I have as a modern American with opportunity, I have to take on some of that guilt of the sins. The sins, the people who suffer and have suffered so I can have . . .” With that, he trailed off.

Jordan Peele Breaks Down His Get Out Follow-Up: “Maybe the Evil Is Us”. By Nicole Sperling. Vanity Fair  , March 10 , 2019.

When Jordan Peele’s directorial debut Get Out hit screens in 2017, it was a revelation. Peele was known as an incisive comedian from his racially frank, wide-ranging sketch show Key and Peele, but nothing in his history suggested he had such a talent for crafting mesmerizing horror stories. Get Out is a startling, frightening film, but it’s also meticulously crafted to make the audience politically and socially uncomfortable, with a candid, unflinching message about how black and white Americans interact, and an allegorical underpinning designed to make viewers of any race squirm with discomfort — while still laughing at the ironic humor in Peele’s script.

Peele has been hugely in demand ever since — he’s been tied to a vast slate of films and TV shows, including producing the Tracy Morgan comedy The Last O.G., the YouTube series Weird City, and the fast-approaching Twilight Zone reboot. But the new feature film Us is his first solo writing-directing project since Get Out. And it’s being met with vocal anticipation and nervous hope, as his fans wonder whether Get Out was an unrepeatable one-off flash of genius, or just the first salvo in a long line of memorable movies to come. Us suggests that both of those things might be true — the new movie isn’t as unconventional as Get Out, or crafted with the same kind of watchmaker’s attention to how every tiny gear fits together. But it’s striking and unsettling, the kind of horror movie designed to make audiences walk away feeling leery about ordinary things around them, from shadows at night to mirrors to rabbits to scissors.

Opening on a shot of a television in 1986, helpfully framed by shelved VHS copies of highly relevant horror movies like C.H.U.D. and A Nightmare on Elm Street, Us initially takes place in two timelines. In 1986, as the Hands Across America benefit is being staged, a young girl (Madison Curry) visits a Santa Cruz beach boardwalk and confronts an eerie apparition that looks just like her. As an adult, Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o) remembers this encounter with a heavy sense of dread, and when her husband Gabe (Winston Duke, M’Baku from Black Panther) books a vacation that takes her back to the same beach, she starts experiencing frightening flashbacks. Soon, eerie dopplegängers of Adelaide, Gabe, and their children Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex) appear, wearing red jumpsuits and wielding brightly colored, hellishly sharp shears. Everything that falls out from there — what the doubles are, where they come from, and what they want— comes as a series of shocks better experienced than described.

Us doesn’t foreground its social metaphor as openly as Get Out, but it’s baked into the premise just as thoroughly. At the post-premiere Q&A at SXSW, Peele said the film is fundamentally about America’s misplaced fear of outsiders. “This movie is about this country,” he said. “We’re in a time where we fear the other, whether it’s the mysterious invader that we think is going to come and kill us and take our jobs, or the faction we don’t live near, who voted a different way than us. We’re all about pointing the finger. And I wanted to suggest that maybe the monster we really need to look at has our face. Maybe the evil, it’s us.”

But while that metaphor plays out in the most literal way, as Adelaide and her family face warped mirror images of themselves, another strong metaphor emerges from the story: a message about wealth inequity, and how easy it is to be unaware of privilege and comfort, while other people are suffering and hungry. Adelaide and her family — and their friends, the Tyler family (Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, and twins Cali and Noelle Sheldon) — live in comparative luxury, and have the freedom to fixate on trivia like whether Jacob can get a magic trick to work, or whether Gabe’s tiny new boat is big enough for the whole family. They’re oblivious to the depths of the suffering going on not far away, among people who are remarkably similar to them, apart from the circumstances of how they came into the world.

And Peele makes the point that where the doubles may look and act like monsters, especially to their victims, they still have an unacknowledged humanity that brings them a kind of horrible pathos. When Adelaide, badly shaken by their arrival, asks one of them what it is, it answers, with a rictus grin, “We’re Americans.”

It’s a hell of a heady experience while it’s running, but it leaves behind a lot of baffling questions. Compared to Get Out, Us feels like more conventional modern horror. It follows a familiar storytelling pattern — initial scare, a drop back to calm and familiar scenes that set up the characters, a series of foreshadowing events and fake-out scares, a sudden escalation of tension. The leadup sometimes feels frustratingly slow and repetitive, especially when the audience isn’t really learning anything new about the characters, apart from the fact that Gabe is oblivious to Adelaide’s past trauma, and that Zora and Jacob don’t particularly get along. And the transition into real horror is so abrupt, it’s almost comical — until it isn’t.

Fans of modern horror will find a lot of familiar ground in Us once the dopplegängers appear. Their initial entrance into the Wilsons’ lives echoes home-invasion thrillers like The Strangers, and the later stalking sequences resemble It Follows in their particular combination of lurking, inevitable terror, and abrupt violence. Us also echoes It Follows in that familiar horror-movie feeling of characters trying to adjust to the new rules of their reality, and figuring out how to exploit them. (Though an early claim that minor but startling coincidences herald the doubles’ arrival doesn’t seem to come to much.) And as the story unfolds, it picks up some resonance with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, though without the tone of extreme self-importance and ridiculous that made that movie so laughable.

Part of what made Get Out so memorable was the way it echoed a recognizable reality — the discomfort the lead character experiences when he’s away from his friends and the people who really get him, the friction that can arise in a racially mixed group, even when both sides are supposedly well-meaning, even the simple embarrassments of trying to get along with a romantic partner’s irritating family, for the sake of the relationship. There’s a lot less recognizable territory in Us, which instead mines tension from the extreme unrecognizability of the situation. The characters are faced with something they don’t understand and don’t know how to fight, and the more the story unfolds, the weirder and wilder it gets, with Peele keeping the reveals coming up to the film’s final moments. The ending seems likely to kick off a lot of frustrated debate — at the SXSW Q&A, Peele said, “My favorite thing is the idea that people will leave ready to have a conversation, with whoever they’re with.” And that certainly seems likely.

But the movie’s biggest strength comes from the cast’s stunning eeriness in playing their own dopplegängers. As “Red,” Adelaide’s double, Nyong’o is staggeringly creepy. She gives Red a voice that sounds like a rock-record backmasking accident, and an overall affect of a collection of primal elements glued into the shape of a human, and making a game effort to play at being one. Duke plays Gabe as an affable dork, trying to jolly his family along with lame dad jokes and an upbeat affect, but he turns his own double, “Abraham,” into a wordless, baffled beast, suffering and dangerous at the same time.

And the kids are similarly creepy, but Shahadi Wright Joseph may be the film’s unheralded MVP — as Zora, she’s sullen and phone-addicted, a kid just testing the limits of adolescence and her ability to resist her parents by finding them annoying. As her own double, she’s a frighteningly perfect specter with an unwavering smile — seemingly a rebuke to the irritating phenomenon of strangers telling women they’d be prettier if they smiled more, most recently seen in the pettiest backlash against Captain Marvel. Joseph doesn’t show her teeth when she smiles, but Us certainly does — everything about its creepy approach to seemingly-normal-things-being-horribly-abnormal comes out in that fixed, unwavering grin.

Peele directs Us with a masterful collection of horror-movie tricks — jump scares that actually pay off, a cat-and-mouse game in an isolated place filled with bright lights and deep pools of impenetrable shadow, a throat-closing Michael Abels score full of intense drumming and choral chanting that elevates the action to operatic levels of drama. But his greatest asset is the performances, which turn an already creepy premise into something endlessly inhuman and unnerving. His stated intention is to get people thinking about their own capabilities for harm, and their own culpabilities in what goes on in America. The capabilities Nyong’o and her castmates show in stepping outside of familiar humanity, and dragging an audience along with them into an unrecognizable place, make a strong argument that we don’t always know what we’re capable of, or what horrors we might contain.

Jordan Peele’s Us turns a political statement into unnerving horror. By Tasha Robinson. The Verge , March 22, 2019.

In Jordan Peele’s new movie, Us, the Wilson family—father, mother, son, daughter—encounters their own strange doubles, who’ve come to exact a terrible revenge. But the Wilsons aren’t the only family to be stalked and menaced. In the second half of the movie, it becomes clear that nearly everyone else in the United States is encountering their doubles—and with similar results.

There are two Americas, Peele suggests. The first is populated by the leisure class and the second is made up of an aggrieved, murderous underclass. So far, so standard, but what exact social issue or experience is Peele attempting to make literal? Us never feels like a straightforward critique of capitalism. The many elements of the story—including the numerous allusions and Easter eggs—never really add up to anything we’ve got words for. We’re left sensing a larger theme we can’t quite name.

And maybe that’s as it should be. Peele is working in the realm of the unspeakable, and as Rod Serling’s famous Twilight Zone intro goes, that territory “lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.” Some of it is unconscious. Even the geniuses don’t always know exactly what they’re laying bare.

Just take what is arguably the source material for Us—Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story “William Wilson,” in which a young man encounters, and ultimately murders, his own uncanny double. “William Wilson” initially appears to have an almost annoyingly obvious meaning: The man’s double is his conscience, or superego as Freudians would have it, and we’re all our own worst enemies. Except I’m not sure we’ve ever really understood Poe’s story. What if “William Wilson” isn’t about what it’s always seemed to be about?

I’d like to float a fresh theory about “William Wilson,” which I think casts light on Us, too. It comes down to the autobiographical nature of Poe’s story and to new research published by the British psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien, namely her work on Boarding School Syndrome.

Schaverien first coined the term “Boarding School Syndrome” in a 2011 paper. In treating patients over many decades, she began to detect a distinct pattern—“an identifiable cluster of learned behaviors and emotional states”—in those patients who’d attended Britain’s elite boarding schools. The image of such education as the pinnacle of privilege has blinded us to the cruelty of the practice, she argued, characterizing the phenomenon as “socially condoned abandonment of the very young” in her 2015 book, Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘Privileged’ Child.

Children who are separated from their families and put into boarding school at a tender age, she’s written, “suffer the sudden and often irrevocable loss of their primary attachments.” Even when not bullied or mistreated at school, the experience of being sent away itself may constitute a “significant trauma” that children may experience as “literally unspeakable.”

“There are no words to adequately express the feeling state and so a shell is formed to protect the vulnerable self from emotion that cannot be processed,” Schaverien has said. “Whilst appearing to conform to the system, a form of unconscious splitting is acquired as a means of keeping the true self hidden.”

“William Wilson” reads like a virtual case study in Boarding School Syndrome. And Poe wrote the story in part about his own experience of boarding school. As most fans know, Poe lost his biological parents early, with both succumbing to tuberculosis in 1811. Few people realize that he effectively lost his family all over again, when his foster parents, John and Frances Allan, put him into boarding school.

The Allan family had moved from Richmond, Va., to London in 1815 so that John could open up a new branch of his business. But Frances quickly grew depressed and withdrawn, and John’s business tanked with the broad economic downturn that began in 1816. Little Edgar, per the longstanding tradition for boys of his age and class, was sent off to school at age six. He first lodged with the Misses Dubourg in a nearby neighborhood. At nine, he was transferred to the more prestigious (and more expensive) Manor House School, in Stoke Newington, much further from the Allans’ home in central London.

Poe used the Manor House School as the initial setting in “William Wilson,” more or less explicitly. The story offers extensive details of its building and grounds. Poe didn’t even bother to change the name of the headmaster, Reverend Bransby (who, according to one source, did not appreciate the mention).

Here the narrator, on his very first day, encounters another boy who’s also entering the school that day. This boy shares the narrator’s name and birthday, as well as every “counter of person and outline of feature.” Other students assume they are brothers.

Though the narrator struggles to define or describe his feelings about his double, he does register “uneasy curiosity” at the “knowing and strangely sarcastic smiles” and “advice not openly given but hinted or insinuated.” Something about this other boy causes him to recall “dim visions of my earliest infancy—wild, confused and thronging memories of a time when memory herself was yet unborn.” When at last the narrator murders his double, the other William Wilson responds, “how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”

The double, of course, is a part of the narrator, his own twin. Or perhaps he’s the narrator’s shell, formed the very day he was put into boarding school. Poe may have been portraying his own unspeakable experience, giving his own psychic split a literal treatment. “William Wilson” drew on some contemporary literary sources, too, but it’s still among the most autobiographical of Poe’s tales.

Art, Schaverien wrote in her book, “offers a way of revealing imagery which has previously had no other form of representation. It shows what cannot be spoken and mediates between conscious and unconscious.” She described one patient who insisted that, on his first day at school, he had “murdered” a part of himself. The man eventually recovered, in part by drawing pictures of his experiences—including a portrait of his “soul murder.” (“They made us cut ourselves in half!” he told Schaverien. “Can it ever be put back together?”)

Reading “William Wilson” in context of Boarding School Syndrome isn’t just an exercise in armchair diagnosis. It raises the possibility that what Poe portrayed in the story—consciously or unconsciously—isn’t solely the symbolic killing of one’s conscience or superego but a deeper and more intimate kind of “soul murder,” through which we become dead to our own feelings, including empathy. The same goes for Peele’s Us.

Though Freud popularized the term “soul murder,” it’s more lately been used to describe abused children who experience psychic splits and by the historian Nell Irvin Painter to explain the psychological dynamics of slavery in antebellum America, including what Painter identified as a deadening of conscience among the privileged, literal master class.

Here’s one example Painter offered.

  John Nelson was a Virginian who spoke in 1839 about his own coming of age… He says, when he was a child, when his father beat their slaves, that he would cry and he would feel for the slave who was being inflicted with violence. He would feel almost as if he himself were being beaten, and he would cry. And he would say, “Stop, stop!” And his father, “You have to stop that. You have to learn to do this, yourself.” And as John Nelson grew up, he did learn how to do it. And he said in 1839 that he got to the point where he not only didn’t cry; he could inflict a beating himself and not even feel it.

Is it  just me, or in all this does the inchoate subtext of Us start to become clearer? What if Us is also about a kind of soul murder, the soul murder that results from privilege, from constantly observing terrible shit and not doing anything about it, from our becoming numb to the inequities (and iniquities) of class in contemporary America, from our loss of attachment to anything resembling collective interests? What if Us isn’t really about class struggle so much as the dreadful knowledge so many of us live with and are—at the same time—effectively deadened to: our awareness that so much of what’s good in our lives depends upon the exploitation, even subjugation, of people who, but for the circumstances of their birth, are just like us?

Maybe we just don’t have a name for this syndrome yet, even though we can sense it effectively operating at scale among us. But I think that, one day, in what I hope is a slightly more enlightened age, we will. Then we might see Us, like “William Wilson,” as a case study ahead of its time.

Was Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’ Inspired by an Edgar Allan Poe Story?  By Catherine Baab-Muguira

The Millions , May 22 , 2019

In the horror genre, black is definitely back.

The movie “Ma,” which premieres on May 31, will star Academy Award winner Octavia Butler as Sue Ann, a lonely middle-age woman who clings to a group of teens to the point of obsession.

“Ma” comes on the heels of Jordan Peele’s critically acclaimed “Us,” which is also led by an Academy Award winner, Lupita Nyong'o. And let’s not forget that Peele’s previous film, “Get Out,” won the Academy Award for best screenplay last year.

Black actors have always had a role in horror films. But something different is taking place today: the re-emergence of true black horror films. Rather than simply including black characters, many of these films are created by blacks, star blacks or focus on black life and culture. For most of film history, black actors have appeared in horror films in supporting roles. Many were deeply problematic.

In my 2011 book, “Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present,” I describe some of these tropes. In the early 20th century, many films – horror or not – had white actors appearing in blackface. The characters could find themselves on the receiving end of especially horrific violence. For example, in 1904’s “A Nigger in the Woodpile,” a black couple’s home is firebombed and the pair staggers out, charred. In the 1930s, there was a spate of horror films that took place in jungles, where blacks were depicted as primitive – sometimes indistinguishable from apes. A decade later, black characters started appearing in horror films as objects of ridicule. Actors like Willie Best and Mantan Moreland appeared as comic relief – characters for audiences to dismissively mock. To be sure, there were some instances in which black actors assumed leading roles. The 1934 film “Chloe, Love is Calling You” starred black actress Georgette Harvey as the vengeful Mandy. In 1957, Joel Fluellen portrayed the smart and reliable Arobi in “Monster from Green Hell.”

However, often these characters existed to support the survival of their white counterparts.

For a brief period, in the 1960s and 1970s, horror films began to treat blacks as whole and full subjects. Many of these narratives centered on black culture and experiences. More often than not, blacks played the role of hero. For example, the 1972 film “Blacula” begins in 1780 and is an indictment of the slave trade and its lingering effects. In the 1974 film “Sugar Hill,” a black female protagonist named Sugar, with the help of her black zombie army, lays waste to a murderous white crime boss and his cronies.

Then there was Bill Gunn’s 1973 art-house horror film, “Ganja & Hess.” A gorgeous and deliberative treatise on race, class, mental illness and addiction, it won the Critics’ Choice prize at the Cannes Film Festival. However, no Hollywood studio was willing to distribute the film.

The classic of the era is George Romero’s 1968 “Night of the Living Dead,” which stars Duane Jones as Ben, a strong, complex black character who leads a group of whites during a zombie apocalypse. Confounding the clichéd trope of “the black guy dies first,” Ben is the lone survivor of the terrifying battle.

In a turn of realism, he emerges triumphant – only to be summarily shot down by a militia of white police and civilians. Ben’s death, which comes at the movie’s conclusion, is as unexpected as it is powerful. The scene demands that audiences consider who among us is truly monstrous.

Sadly, these glimpses of blackness faded as many horror films in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s reverted to well-worn tropes. In some, like “The Shining” and “Annabelle,” black characters operate as the “sacrificial Negro” who dies to save a white character’s life. Then there are the dozens of films, like 1987’s “Angel Heart” and 1988’s “The Serpent and the Rainbow,” in which black characters appear as wicked Voodoo practitioners.

Jordan Peele’s films should be thought of as an homage to “Night of the Living Dead” and “Ganja & Hess” – films that have strong, complex black protagonists. In fact, Peele has noted that Ben’s fate in “Night of the Living Dead,” which was released as the U.S. mourned the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., weighed heavily on him when he wrote the ending of “Get Out.” Peele’s character – unlike Ben – survives.

While Peele has shown that the genre can be a daring, unflinching examination of politics, class and race, the black horror renaissance has been brewing for some years.

Over the past two decades, Ernest Dickerson – who directed “The Purge,” “Bones,” “Demon Knight” and episodes of “The Walking Dead” – and Rusty Cundieff, the director of “Tales from the Hood” and “Tales from the Hood 2,” have been stalwarts of the genre. They’ve paved the way for Peele, as well as newcomers such as Meosha Bean, Nikyatu Jusu and Deon Taylor.

The horror genre is maturing and becoming more imaginative and inclusive – in who can play hero and antihero, and who gets to be the monster and savior. The emergence of black horror films is just one chapter in a story that includes women taking on more prominent roles in horror films, too.

It’s about time. As Jordan Peele noted in an interview in the documentary film “Horror Noire,” the fact that there had been “such a small handful of films led by black people” was, to him, “the horror itself.”

We’re in a golden age of black horror films. By Robin R. Means Coleman. The Conversation. May 29 , 2019.

 Sean Hennnesy talks with Jordan Peele  after the premiere of his new film ‘Us’ at SXSW—to discuss following up ‘Get Out,’ working with stars like Lupita Nyong’o, Elisabeth Moss, and Winston Duke, and tackling complex themes within the horror genre.

The Big Picture