Anyone who has seen Get Out or Us knows that Jordan Peele likes to layer horror references and Easter eggs within the fabric of the stories he’s telling for his audiences to appreciate on multiple viewings. While Get Out’s numerous hidden meanings and horror nods have been sussed out and pored over thoroughly in the two and a half years since its initial bow, the relatively recent release of Us *still* has fans investigating and uncovering clever references buried within the film. Case in point: eagle-eyed fan Cameron Bender, who took to Twitter recently to point out the surprising similarities to be found between Peele’s newest fright fare and a classic John Carpenter horror film – 1987’s Prince of Darkness.
Bender, in a series of tweets (start here), pointed out some eye-poppingly analogous moments between the two films, as well as a sequence in Prince which underlines that the pair of features may have a comparable thematic underpinning, as well. In addition, your writer found some other similarities while rewatching Prince for the purposes of writing this article. Some of the moments we found will likely seem superficial, while others may very well seem fairly substantial. Let’s take a look!
In Bender’s first tweet, he screencaps a shot of Prince’s threatening homeless figures surrounding the church which acts as the film’s primary location. The image easily reminds one of Us’ introduction to its four main antagonists, as they stand at the edge of our heroes’ property. In fact, there is another moment earlier on in Prince, featuring a smaller amount of homeless folks (four, in fact), standing at the edge of the church property that they’ve been hovering about. As the homeless numbers grow throughout the film, the line they form looks not at all dissimilar to the “Hands Across America” formation that Us’ lead villain Red has designed as her ultimate statement in introducing the above-ground world to the Tethered.
And speaking of the homeless characters, there are two other moments in Prince which Us seems to echo a bit in regard to those characters. Early on in Prince, one character notices a homeless woman standing by herself on a sidewalk, outstretching her arm and then freezing in place. She stands that way, holding eerily still, as though waiting for something specific to occur. Compare this moment to Jason first encountering Jeremiah in Us, the homeless Tethered man on the beach, who stands frozen in place with his arms outstretched to either side while awaiting his fellow Tethereds to take his hands and begin forming their inevitable line. Jeremiah’s look even manages to remind one of Prince’s iconic Street Schizo, portrayed by Alice Cooper.
In a later tweet, Bender points out a sequence in which one of Prince’s characters takes note of the homeless figures gathering outside of the church, then notes that they’d had a friend who’d studied chronic schizophrenics at UCLA. She tells another character that schizophrenics are meant to have stereotyped routines (“You know, like a stuck record in their brains.”), but that the homeless people outside “…don’t seem to be making any movements. They just stand there.” This character’s observations could very well describe Us’ Tethered, who act out routines when they’re mimicking or controlling their above-ground counterparts, and yet are utterly still and entirely without movement once they’ve joined the “Hands Across America” line.
And surely the most eye-popping visual echo between films involving the homeless characters is a major setpiece that happens later on in Prince. In this sequence, one of Prince’s characters (the douchey Wyndham) is memorably stabbed to death by a homeless woman wielding one half of a broken pair of scissors. Anyone who’s seen Us should know that the signature weapon of the Tethered is an iconic pair of golden scissors, which they use to puncture and slash their prey.
And when it comes to the Tethered, one can note that they’re usually the dark mirror-version of their above-world counterparts. Whereas Us heroine Adelaide is kind and well-spoken, Tethered doppelganger Red is wild-eyed, vicious, and speaks in a halting cadence. And while Adelaide’s husband Gabe is generally light-hearted and funny, his own Tethered double Abraham is dour and menacing. A similar duality can be found in Prince, which finds many of its characters possessed by the demonic green fluid housed underneath the church that they’ve holed up in. Once possessed, their personalities are overcome and altered, rendering them into stone-faced, intermittently robotic and psychotic imitations of themselves.
And speaking of that green fluid! As revealed by Donald Pleasence’s Priest early on in Prince, this demonic entity is held underground, in a lair built in the 1500s by forgotten sect The Brotherhood of Sleep. This Brotherhood’s very existence was kept secret, as they wielded their enormous power and authority on the world above it. Compare this to the underground facility which held the Tethered, their own existence kept a secret as they were wielded by a powerful government exerting its authority to control the Tethered’s unwitting doubles above ground.
In Bender’s final tweet, he points out a sequence between Prince’s Professor Birack and Pleasence’s Priest, who discuss the nature of the evil they’re facing. Birack, so very well portrayed by Big Trouble in Little China’s Victor Wong, has a monologue which theorizes about the true nature of the universe…and its darker twin. And, well, I’ll just let his monologue speak for itself – “Suppose there is a universal mind controlling everything. A God willing every subatomic particle. Now, every particle has an anti-particle. Its mirror image. Its negative side…” Could this speech not also describe the nature of the Tethered and their initial usefulness to the government which eventually abandoned them to live below ground?
Whether or not these similarities hold any weight is entirely up to Peele to shine a light on. It’s possible that these moments from Prince may have inspired similar ideas in Peele on a subconscious level, or maybe it’s entirely a coincidence. After all, the films couldn’t be more dissimilar on a macro level – one a creepy frightfest concerned with the collision of science and the supernatural, the other a dark horror film driven by social concerns. Nevertheless, given that Peele is an outspoken horror fan, it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that Prince is, on some level, a part of Us’ cinematic DNA. In any case, it’s a testament to the quality and power of both films that they’re worthy of such scrutiny of the part of such fans as Cameron Bender – fans who will surely continue to seek out and find further meaning on subsequent viewings of these and numerous other films.
To any and all such genre enthusiasts, I salute you with my own pair of bloodstained scissors.
