The 10 Films That Inspired Jordan Peele’s Us — And Where to Watch Them

Alfred Hitchcock directed and produced this horror-thriller loosely based on Daphne du Maurier's short story of the same name. The movie stars Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, and Jessica Tandy and focuses on a series of mysterious attacks by birds on the people of a small town in Bodega Bay, California. According to The Birds by Camille Paglia, an analytical text published by the British Film Institute, Hitchcock claimed that the birds in the film rebel against humanity to punish us for taking nature for granted.

Similarly, Us is a movie about a group of people who rebel against a society that has cast them aside. The Tethered rise up to take back the lives they deserve from a nation of people who have become numb by prosperity. Essentially, both films strike a chord of fear in the audience by using the face of something quite familiar.

You can watch The Birds online at Amazon Prime.

Jack Nicholson stars as Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of this 1977 novel by Stephen King. Jack is an aspiring writer and recovering alcoholic who accepts a position as the off-season caretaker at an isolated hotel. Staying with Jack during the winter is his son Danny and wife Wendy. Danny has a supernatural ability known as "the shining," which allows him to see the hotel's bloody past. Through these visions, the audience learns that the previous caretaker went crazy and murdered his family. Soon Jack's sanity wavers as well, putting the lives of both his wife and son on the line.

The influences of The Shining on Us are numerous — from the use of those creepy twins to the fact that both families travel to a remote location and encounter an otherworldly phenomenon. But most chillingly, these films share the theme of questioning what happens when we succumb to our primal urges. In the book Stanley Kubrick: The Complete Films by Paul Duncan, Kubrick states that the theme of The Shining deals with the splitting of the human mind: "There's something inherently wrong with the human personality. There's an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious; we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly." In the case of Us, Peele allows the Wilsons' dark sides — the Tethered — to run free so that we as the audience are forced to ask ourselves whether the face we show the world is an accurate reflection of what lies beneath.

You can watch The Shining online at Google Play.

Kenneth Branagh directs and stars in Dead Again along with Emma Thompson. The couple play lovers who uncover repressed memories of their former lives where they had a barbarous relationship. Oddly, the duo seems destined to reenact their murderous saga through the bodies of their reincarnated counterparts. Dead Again, like Us, plays with the memories of two people who find it difficult to sever the connection and uses scissors as a metaphor for the duality of man.

You can watch Dead Again online at Amazon Prime.

Funny Games revolves around two young men who take over a family's lakeside holiday home and demand their hostages participate in a series of violent acts. Michael Haneke wrote and directed the 1997 Austrian version as well as the shot-for-shot 2007 American remake starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as the familial leads. Like the original, Haneke's remake exposes our fascination with the media's depiction of violence — the "our" specifically referring to the middle class who remain rooted in their comfortable existence oblivious to the suffering of others.

Peele clearly has several nods to this premise in his home invasion scenes where the doppelgängers make a game of their untethering such as insisting Zora run while Umbrae gives chase. However, the thematic similarities are what's most striking in that Peele's film also seeks to demonstrate how our indifference to affluence and good fortune can alienate the poor and marginalized who struggle to rise above their station.

You can watch the 2007 American remake of Funny Games on Google Play.

Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, The Sixth Sense tells the story of Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), a boy who communicates with the dead, and Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), the child psychologist who tries to help him. The big twist is that Malcolm Crowe is one of Cole's visions of the deceased. However, the filmmaker provides several hints to the big reveal using the colour red as a signifier of the supernatural encroaching on the modern world.

If you look closely, the opening sequence of Us uses red to symbolize a similar overlapping of realms and to underscore many of the film's traumatic moments.

You can watch The Sixth Sense on Netflix.

A Tale of Two Sisters is a psychological horror written and directed by Kim Jee-woon and inspired by a popular Korean fairy tale entitled "Janghwa Hongryeon jeon." The plot focuses on Su-mi, a teenage girl recently released from a mental institution after treatment for psychosis. She returns to the countryside home of her father, younger sister, and stepmother Eun-joo. Su-mi and her sister soon find themselves struggling to escape their stepmother's torturous punishments — but not everything is as it seems.

On a thematic level, this film connects to Us in the way that it highlights the terrible things people do to themselves and each other. But the film also offers a horrific parallel to the repressed guilt the adult Adelaide must feel about snatching a young life from the Santa Cruz funhouse all those years ago and the perverse lengths Adelaide's willing to go to keep the truth hidden from her family as well as herself.

For those interested in additional research, Dreamworks produced a 2009 loose remake starring Emily Browning called The Uninvited.

You can watch A Tale of Two Sisters on Shudder.

Written and directed by French filmmaker Pascal Laugier and starring Morjana Alaoui and Mylène Jampanoï, Martyrs depicts the path a woman takes to exact her revenge for the physical abuse she suffered as a child. The film's title refers to people who take the torturous madness that comes with suffering or trauma and transcends those feelings to a point of acceptance that gives insight to this world and the one beyond. Essentially Martyrs, like Us, tackles the idea that traumatic moments never leave the psyche and that they impact adulthood in extreme ways. In Us, Red's kidnapping from the Santa Cruz boardwalk as a child kickstarts a violent chain of events that leads to the Tethered's rebellion, exposes our nation's neglect of the disenfranchised masses, and tears our country apart.

For those interested in additional research, directors Kevin and Michael Goetz remade this film in 2015.

You can watch Martyrs online on iTunes.

Let the Right One In is Swedish romantic horror film directed by Tomas Alfredson and based on the John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel of the same name. The film tells the story of a bullied 12-year-old boy named Oskar who develops a romantic bond with a young girl named Eli. On realising that Eli is a bloodthirsty vampire, Oskar forgives her and declares that their true natures coincide; that is to say, Oskar wants to kill his tormentors and the girl needs to kill to survive.

But how does this coincide with Us?

Adelaide and Red's dual natures inform how they kill and why. As with Let the Right One In, neither character's motivation to kill is wholly villainous or virtuous. We initially think of Adelaide as the hero and Red as the villain even though the revelatory twist of their intertwined past places why each woman kills into more of a grey area than we initially believe. Even still, Adelaide and Red both commit horrific acts to further their respective causes. For Adelaide, this means kidnapping and killing to make a better life for herself and her middle-class family. For Red, this means stageing an uprising to kill millions of people in an effort to take back what she believes rightfully belongs to her. Though the audience is prone to negatively judge Red's actions — just as we initially do when we understand Eli is a vampire — the truth is that there is good and bad in all of us.

For those interested in additional research, Cloverfield director Matt Reeves wrote and directed an English-language version in 2010 titled Let Me In.

You can watch Let The Right One In on Hulu.

Australian director Jennifer Kent's horror film is a heart-thumping frightmare that tells the story of a mother's anxiety for her son as the two find themselves haunted by a demon emanating from a pop-up book called Mister Babadook. But unlike most tales of terror where the beast is defeated or the heroes move away to avoid further conflict, the mother and son in The Babadook have a different solution.

It may simply be a subversive coda to an already unusual horror movie, but we'd argue this is a nod to a greater message. Just like the Wilsons seemingly win the battle by defeating their doppelgängers, they ultimately walk away with one (maybe two) of the Tethered in their midst. Basically, the compartmentalizing of the monster, as a metaphor for fear and loss, found at the end of The Babadook is eerily similar to what the adult Adelaide in Us has to do to move forward from her sins as a child of the Tethered. Now that she has gained a new life as Mrs. Wilson, she's not about to jeopardize it — but she also knows she wouldn't be the woman she's become without the events of her painful past.

You can watch The Babadook on Amazon Prime.

Director David Robert Mitchell's It Follows centres on a college co-ed named Jay who goes on a date that turns deadly. Jay's new beau, Hugh, claims he's being followed by a force no one else can see. He eventually transmits the curse of this unseen entity onto Jay through sex; whereupon, Hugh explains the supernatural being can take the appearance of any person seen by the eyes of the cursed but will remain invisible to others. If the force catches Jay, it will kill her and pursue Hugh as the previous person to have passed the demon along.

Part of what makes It Follows terrifying is the idea that the invisible nature of the attacker makes it impossible for anyone to truly provide aid to the heroine. There's a similar feeling of helplessness for the Wilsons and the audience in Us because we all know from experience that no one can help us with our personal demons except ourselves.

You can watch It Follows on Amazon Prime.