Good horror shocks and scares in the moment. Great horror horrifies, getting under the audience’s skin and leaving them uneasy long after they’ve finished watching a film or put down a book. This element of horror—the horrifying—hinges on what is known as the uncanny, a defamiliarizing of the familiar. The horror film Us, directed by Jordan Peele, delivers a truly horrifying, terrifying experience through brilliant use of the uncanny—chiefly in the form of repetition.
Us follows Adelaide Wilson and her family as they fight off their doppelgangers, known as the Tethered. In An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, Bennett and Royle note that the uncanny makes things uncertain as it disrupts what is familiar and challenges rationality and logic. The most obvious use of the uncanny in the film is repetition, in which a feeling, situation, event, or character is repeated to the point that it becomes strange and creepy. Us is centered around this concept. The Tethered themselves are repetitions: they are clones of regular humans, but something is off about them. Their movements are erratic and jerky, and all of them are unable to speak (with the exception of Adelaide’s Tethered, Red), communicating in grunts, groans, and shrieks instead. Their facial expressions are over-exaggerated, unhinged, and creepy. Even their weapon of choice—a pair of scissors—is an example of repetition, as it is made of two identical blades that mirror each other. Repetition is also used as a signal that the Tethered are close by. Adelaide, for example, begins to see the number 11 over and over again as the Tethered draw nearer: in a Bible verse, a baseball game score, on a clock, even Channel 11 on television. The number 11 is not particularly scary on its own. When repeated so often, however, it takes on an eerie nature as it becomes a harbinger of danger. The numerical 11 can also be seen as a Tethered in itself, displayed using two identical copies of the number one. The two ones are intrinsically bound to each other, not unlike the way a Tethered and a human are bound together.
Imagery of mirrors and reflections feature prominently throughout the film. The Tethered are distorted mirrors of their human counterparts. Adelaide encounters Red for the first time as a child in a house of mirrors. When she later recounts this traumatic experience to her husband Gabe, she refuses to look at him, instead staring straight forward at her reflection in a window as she speaks. The Tethered can also be considered shadows. Red herself says as much when she explains the connection between humans and their Tethered: “Once upon a time, there was a girl, and the girl had a shadow” (Us 44:44–45:05). The film even hints to this in an earlier scene where the Wilsons visit the beach, casting long shadows as they walk along the sand. Either way, as mirrors or as shadows, the Tethered exist as terrifying repetitions of the Wilson family. This is where the uncanny lies: while the Tethered are rooted in the familiar image of the human body, the reflected image of inhuman mannerisms and behavior is anything but familiar. They mimic their human counterparts’ personalities and interests in twisted ways as well. Adelaide’s daughter Zora, a track star, is surpassed in superhuman speed by her Tethered Umbrae. Her son Jason plays with magic tricks, while his Tethered Pluto plays with fire. As Bennett and Royle put it, “the uncanny is not much in the text: rather, it is like a foreign body within ourselves” (43). The Tethered, as foreign bodies cloned from human bodies, expertly demonstrate this point. When Jason quietly states “it’s us” (Us 44:24–22:26) after seeing the Tethered for the first time, he recognizes them as his own family rather than separate entities. Just as the uncanny is inextricably bound to the familiarity in the self, Tethered are inextricably bound to the humans they are cloned from.
The true twist of the film comes when it is revealed that Adelaide is actually a Tethered, and was born as Red. When she encountered the real Adelaide in the house of mirrors as a child, she knocked Adelaide out and took her place in the human world, leaving Adelaide to take her place in the underground world of the Tethered. Peele leaves hints to this throughout the film. Adelaide moves a bit more erratically than the rest of her family during times of stress. She also reverts to Tethered-like vocalizations whenever she kills one of them: grunting, groaning, and even laughing when she finally kills Red. This reveal that Adelaide is the repetition of Red, rather than the other way around, turns the audience’s perception of the film upside down and destroys what they led to believe was familiar and safe. As Bennett and Royle note, the uncanny “concerns a sense of unfamiliarity that appears at the very heart of the familiar, or else a sense of familiarity that appears at the very heart of the unfamiliar” (35). Adelaide and Red embody this concept; Adelaide is the unfamiliar Tethered buried in the heart of the familiar, and Red is the familiar human hidden inside the unfamiliar. Ray Malewitz notes in his video “What is the Uncanny?” that the uncanny and canny often overlap; Us does just that, creating its environment of fear and tension by blurring the lines between what is familiar and what is unfamiliar, as well as what is the repetition and what is the original.
Us demonstrates masterful use of the uncanny in the form of repetition. The Tethered are terrifying repetitions of regular humans, distorting their familiar features and interests into something unfamiliar and dangerous. The repeated mirror and shadow imagery throughout the film combine to create a truly unnerving, horrifying experience that persists in the audience’s imagination. Us begs the question long after the viewer has turned off their television: what would your Tethered look like? How would your Tethered behave? And what if your Tethered is on their way to find you at this very moment?
Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. 5th ed., Routledge, 2016.
Malewitz, Ray. “What is the Uncanny?: A Literary Guide for Students and Teachers.” YouTube, uploaded by Oregon State University – School of Writing, Literature and Film, 4 Aug 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IHvGHGVAM0.
Us. Directed by Jordan Peele, performances by Lupita Nyong’o, Universal Pictures, 2019.