With its record breaking opening weekend, Us proved without a shadow of a doubt that audiences crave the mix of horror, comedy, and social commentary that director Jordan Peele packs into his films. While Peele’s work feels undeniably fresh and innovative, it belongs to a long-running form of horror, featuring movies that make you think and laugh while making you scream. It’s a lineage that Peele acknowledges in the 1986 prologue to Us, which not only introduces protagonist Adelaide Wilson (played as a child by Madison Curry and as an adult by Lupita Nyong’o), but also makes direct references to some of the movies that influenced Peele.
Here are eight movies from the decade that laid the groundwork Peele continues to build upon today.
The Shining (1980, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
Gabe Wilson, the goofy dad played wonderfully by Winston Duke, may be far more likable than Jack Nicholson’s recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance, but the family dynamics in Us and The Shining lend both of those movies their strength. When Torrance brings his wife Wendy (Shelly Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd) to take care of Colorado’s secluded Overlook Hotel during its off-season months, he transforms into a killer, masking evil intent behind a face his family once loved.
The Shining most strongly influenced the visuals of Us, as the terror invoked by the famous scene of the ghostly Grady twins begging Danny to play is doubled by Peele’s use of not just scary twin girls, but a country’s worth of doppelgängers. Likewise, the frazzled mother Wendy, fearfully gripping a baseball bat as she defends Danny from her husband, finds her opposite when Adelaide arms herself with a fireplace poker to hunt the woman attacking her family.
Poltergeist (1982, dir. Tobe Hooper)
“You moved the cemetery, but you left the bodies, didn’t you? You son of a bitch, you left the bodies and you only moved the headstones!” This startling realization comes to realtor and dad Steve Freeling (Craig T. Nelson) after days of hauntings in his state of the art suburban home. The American Dream Steve thought he was living and selling was built on the bodies of others; others who rise for their revenge.
Even more than The Shining, Poltergeist works by giving us a lovable American family and then placing them in danger. Us builds terror in the same way, letting viewers spend plenty of time with the Wilsons as they drive in their station wagon, listen to pop songs, and lovingly bicker. But just like the Freelings, the Wilsons discover that the middle-class lifestyle they enjoy comes at a cost. And the victims are coming for payback.
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984, dir. Joseph Zito)
Does this seem familiar? A little boy with a love for monster masks uses his skills to stop a killer from murdering his family. In this case, the boy is Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman), who moves with his mother and big sister to a quiet house near Camp Crystal Lake. After Jason Voorhees finishes killing a skeevy coroner, an ineffective monster hunter, and a group of partying college kids (including Crispin Glover!), he makes his way to the Jarvis home.
The second act of Us functions much like a home invasion/slasher movie hybrid, as does most of this fourth entry in the Friday the 13th series. Armed with scissors and their distinctive red suits, the tethered have that immediate recognizability that made 80’s movie monsters into pop culture phenoms. And with a Fangoria cover appearance already to her name, Red is well on her way to claiming her rightful place beside horror icons like Jason and Freddy.
C.H.U.D. (1984, dir. Douglas Cheek)
In the first shot of Us, we see a television lined with several VHS tapes, including The Goonies, the Steve Martin sci-fi comedy The Man With Two Brains, and C.H.U.D. Given that last movie’s reputation, one could be forgiven for dismissing the tape as a meaningless bit of set dressing, a tongue-in-cheek nod to a genre that Peele “classes up.” After all, most people who know anything about C.H.U.D. only think of its silly name (Cannibal Humanoid Underground Dwellers, for the uninitiated), its cool painted cover, and its period-appropriate creature effects.
But one look at the synopsis, and the movie’s connection to Us becomes clear. In C.H.U.D., homeless people living in underground tunnels become monsters after being exposed to toxic waste recklessly discarded by the government. Their humanity taken from them, the mutants rise from below to seek their revenge against surface dwellers. Anchored by a top-notch cast — including John Heard, Daniel Stern, and Kim Greist —C.H.U.D. sometimes puts its message before its monster; but when the monster shows up, it’s a pretty great time.
Night of the Creeps (1986, dir. Fred Dekker)
The tethered aren’t zombies, but they tap into the same primal fear evoked by cinema’s favorite brain-eaters. When victims see a tethered ambling toward them, they see someone they thought they knew — but slightly off, slightly different, and very menacing. But as scary as they might be, both the tethered and zombies have an inherently goofy quality, something Peele capitalizes on in Us with great performances by Elizabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker.
A number of great zombie comedies came out in the 80s, but none better anticipated Us’s humor than Fred Dekker’s Night of the Creeps. Dekker also opens his film with a prologue set several decades earlier before moving to current day of 1986, where a government project from the past leads to chaos in the present — alien slugs turning college students into zombies. Like Peele, Dekker proudly declares his love for the horror of his youth by jumping from genre to genre and filling his film with references to forerunners like Roger Corman and contemporaries like David Cronenberg.
The Lost Boys (1987, dir. Joel Schumacher)
As young Adelaide walks the Santa Cruz boardwalk in the prologue to Us, her mother Rayne (Anna Diop) suggests they check out the movie being filmed at the very same location. That movie? The Lost Boys, the teen vampire flick featuring Kiefer Sutherland, Corey Haim, Corey Feldman, and lots of hairspray.
Through the stylish lens of director Joel Schumacher, Santa Cruz becomes the fictional Santa Carla, more of a hazy nightmare than the bourgeois paradise depicted by Peele. But the latter film borrows a few ideas from the story of a family thrown into chaos when, shortly after moving from Phoenix, older brother Michael (Jason Patric) falls into the sway of charismatic vampire David (Sutherland). An entertaining teen adventure take on vampire lore, The Lost Boys bears the influence of its producer Richard Donner, whose The Goonies gets a few nods in Us.
They Live (1988, dir. John Carpenter)
“I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubble gum.” With lines like that, which star Rowdy Roddy Piper perfected after years as a WWF heel, They Live sometimes feels like the most over-the-top action movie in a decade filled with over-the-top action movies. And it does feature a glorious five minute and twenty second alleyway brawl between Piper and Keith David. But in adapting the Ray Nelson short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning,” writer/director John Carpenter has more on his mind than awesomely gratuitous fisticuffs.
Peele has often declared his love for Carpenter and one could see how he’s followed the latter’s lead in using genre films as a means of social commentary. A drifter looking for construction work, Piper’s Nada falls in with Frank Armitage (David, playing a character whose surname may have inspired the villainous family’s name in Get Out) and a street preacher whose sunglasses allow him to see the American upper class for what they are: aliens subjugating humans through capitalism. Although it’s unapologetic in its love of the disinherited and anger toward inequality, They Live never forgets to be well-crafted and entertaining, a lesson Peele has taken to heart.
Dead Ringers (1988, dir. David Cronenberg)
If there’s any justice in the world, then Lupita Nyong’o will win an Academy Award for her dual performance as Adelaide Wilson and her doppelgänger Red. But given the Oscars’ lack of respect toward horror, I’m not holding my breath. Even if she does get snubbed, though, Nyong’o will be in good company, as Jeremy Irons also received no award recognition for his memorable role as identical twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliott Mantle.
Like Us, Dead Ringers uses twins to explore questions of identity, as the Mantle brothers exploit women by pretending to be one another — the more confident Elliott seduces the women, and passes them to the introverted Beverly after he tires of them. When both brothers fall in love with a troubled actress (Geneviève Bujold), drug abuse and depression drives them insane. Beverly’s delusions cause him to craft unique handheld gynecological instruments and to don bright red surgical robes — not unlike the union suits and scissors Us’s Red uses when leading the tethered’s revolution.
