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With Jordan Peele's second inventive, ambitious horror film, we have seen how to beat the sophomore jinx, and it is Us .

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Review: Jordan Peele’s “Us” Is a Colossal Cinematic Achievement

By Richard Brody

The success of Jordan Peele’s 2017 film, “ Get Out ,” bought him time, he said, in a recent interview with Le Monde —for his new film, “Us,” he had twice as many shoot days. The expanded time frame allowed him to produce a work of expanded ambition: “Us” bounces back and forth between 1986 and the present day, and its action, compared to “Get Out,” has a vast range—geographical, dramatic, and intellectual. The movie’s imaginative spectrum is enormous, four-dimensionally so: it delves deep into a literal underground world that lends the hallucinatory concept of the “sunken place” from “Get Out” a physical embodiment. And it captures the transformative, radical power of a political conscience, of an idea long held in secret, as it ripens and develops over decades’ worth of time. “Us” is nothing short of a colossal achievement.

Structured like a home-invasion drama, “Us” is a horror film—though saying so is like offering a reminder that “The Godfather” is a gangster film or that “2001: A Space Odyssey” is science fiction. Genre is irrelevant to the merits of a film, whether its conventions are followed or defied; what matters is that Peele cites the tropes and precedents of horror in order to deeply root his film in the terrain of pop culture—and then to pull up those roots. “Us” is a film that places itself within pop culture for diagnostic—and even self-diagnostic—purposes; its subject is, in large measure, cultural consciousness and its counterpart, the cultural unconscious. The crucial element of horror is political and moral—the realities that metaphorical fantasies evoke.

Peele reaches deep into the symbolic DNA of pop culture to discover a hidden, implicit history that he brings to the fore, at a moment of growing recognition that the deeds of the past still rage with silent and devastating force in the present time. After a title card notes the presence of a vast hidden network of tunnels (as for abandoned railways and mines) beneath American soil, the action begins with a bit of pop archeology: a shot of an old-fashioned tube TV set, on which a commercial is playing for “Hands Across America,” a 1986 philanthropic fund-raising event that involved an effort to create a human chain from coast to coast. (The announcer’s voice-over says, “Six million people will tether themselves together to fight hunger in America.”)

At that time, a young girl named Adelaide (though her name isn’t heard until much later in the film, when she’s an adult) is visiting a Santa Cruz beach with her squabbling parents. The child (Madison Curry) wanders off, enters a beachside haunted-house attraction, and, there, walking through a hall of mirrors reminiscent of the one in Orson Welles’s “The Lady from Shanghai,” sees not her reflection but her physical double. After the incident, her parents find her traumatized, but just what happened isn’t clear to them. In the present day, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is married to Gabe Wilson (Winston Duke), and they have two children, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), a teen-ager, and Jason (Evan Alex), who seems to be about eight. The Wilsons are prosperous—they’re heading to a summer house by a lake, where Gabe buys a speedboat (albeit a beat-up, run-down one) on a whim. It’s not clear what they do for a living; Adelaide used to dance but gave it up. What is clear is that she now has an aversion to the beach because of the haunted house, which is still there, in a slightly different guise. Her memories and flashbacks suggest that the trauma from whatever happened in the house has haunted her for her whole life.

The Wilsons are black, a fact that, as depicted, has little overt effect on their lives. Avoiding the stereotypes of black Americans in movies, Peele instead knowingly depicts them as a stereotype of a financially successful, socially stable, and cinematically average American family. It’s as though they naturally and unintentionally use what Boots Riley’s film, “Sorry to Bother You,” would call their “white voice,” the voice of white-dominated corporate prosperity. (There’s even a wink back to “Get Out,” regarding the Wilsons’ utterly untroubled confidence in the police.) Their summer companions are a white (and wealthier) family, the Tylers, Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker), and their twin daughters, Becca (Cali Sheldon) and Lindsey (Noelle Sheldon).

Back at their summer house that night, Adelaide experiences premonitions—she tells Gabe that she feels that her double is out there somewhere. “My whole life I’ve felt as if she’s still coming for me,” she says, and, on this night, she feels as if “she’s getting closer.” Moments later, Jason sees another family standing outside the house; it turns out to be four doubles of the Wilson family, distinguished by their matching red jumpsuits (reminiscent of prison uniforms) and tan sandals, their static posture—holding hands side by side, in the manner of Hands Across America—and their silence. The doubles soon burst into the house, facing off against the Wilsons while Adelaide’s double (named, in the credits, Red)—the only one of the four doppelgängers to speak—states, in a hoarse and halting voice, her demands.

No less than “Get Out,” “Us” is a work of directorial virtuosity, in which Peele invests every moment, every twist, every diabolically conceived and gleefully invoked detail with graphic, psychological resonance and controlled tone, in performance and gesture. Here, as in “Get Out,” Peele employs point-of-view shots to put audience members in the position of the characters, to conjure subjective and fragmentary experience that reverberates with the metaphysical eeriness of their suddenly doubled world. (Recurring nods to Hitchcock’s “The Birds” suggest a mysterious transformation of the natural order.) Exactly as the title promises (and as the drama delivers, when Jason identifies the intruders, saying, “It’s us”), the movie turns the screen into a funhouse mirror in which the distortions prove to be truer representations of the state of things—in the world of its viewers—than more familiar, realistic depictions.

A distinctively American vision is planted throughout the action of “Us,” with an explicit and monitory allusion to the notion of national destiny. As a child, Adelaide sees, at the beach, a silent beachcomber-prophet with a sign that reads “Jeremiah 11:11.” In that chapter, God grants people land on the condition that they keep their covenant with Him, but when they revert to “the sins of their ancestors,” they face divine retribution: “Therefore this is what the Lord says: ‘I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them.’ ” When Adelaide asks the family’s doubles “What are you people?,” the wording of the question (not “who” but “what”) is less offensive than it is literally ontological: Are they alive or dead? Are they zombies or robots or creatures from space or figments of their imagination? Red’s answer is “We’re Americans.” (Even the title, “Us,” doubles as “U.S.”)

“Us” is intensely suspenseful (it would be sinful to spoil its twists or even to hint at its scares) and moderately gory—yet the bloodshed rigorously serves the drama. It’s never there to gross out viewers or to test their threshold of shock or disgust. (And I’m squeamish.) In particular, the explicit violence provides a serious view of life-threatening dangers that compel bourgeois characters to get their hands dirty with the act of killing—it shows what they’re up against and what they have to face, and to do, in an effort to save themselves. Yet “Us” also offers that safety, that salvation, with bitter irony. (It brings to mind Florence Reece’s pro-union song “ Which Side Are You On? ”) It’s a movie that, true to its genre, is plotted with hair-trigger mechanisms that tweak suspense with surprises—intellectual ones along with dramatic and sensory ones.

With its foretold emphasis on tunnels, “Us” proves to be something like Peele’s version of “ Notes from Underground ,” complete with its fiery arias of torment from those whose voices otherwise go unheard. (There’s a relevant wink along the way at Samuel Fuller’s jangling masterwork “ Shock Corridor .”) The term that describes the link between the Wilsons and their doubles is called “tethering”—and that word, in its many grammatical forms, recurs throughout the film (not least, in repeated allusions to Hands Across America). The nature of bonds—social bonds, voluntary and involuntary connections of some people to others—is at the heart of the movie, the desire for solidarity with some, the intended or oblivious dissociation from others.

The movie’s many pop-culture references—whether kids wearing T-shirts for “Thriller” and “Jaws” or the presence of “Good Vibrations” and “Fuck tha Police” on the soundtrack—are no mere decorations. Peele’s radical vision of inequality, of the haves and the have-nots, those who are in and those who are out, is reflected brightly and brilliantly in his view of pop culture, current and classic (including riffs on romantic melodrama and on the notion of emotional expression as a luxury in itself). Mass media is presented in “Us” as a rich people’s culture, if not in the immediate origins of its artists, then in the production, distribution, marketing, platforming, and lawyering of the work—in the very notion of its valuable and ubiquitous legacy. (In the Le Monde interview, Peele cited the soundtrack as another principal benefit of his higher budget.)

“Us” highlights the unwitting complicity of even apparently well-meaning and conscientious people in an unjust order that masquerades as natural and immutable but is, in fact, the product of malevolent designs that leave some languishing in the perma-shadows. (Designed by whom? The movie doesn’t name names, but it winks and nods and nudges in a general direction that runs from the sea to the lake.) It dramatizes this world, but with a twist—one that (avoiding spoilers) risks overturning conventional values and sympathies with ecstatic fervor. Suffice it to say that “Us” reserves empathy for its unwitting villains while gleefully deriding their comfortably normal state of obliviousness—and the ordinary absurdities of the world at large.

The movie’s exquisite perceptiveness and its alluring details are part of a vision that ranges between the outrageously sardonic and the grandly tragic. It renders the movie, for all its suspense, violence, and moral outrage, as much of a joy to recall, moment by moment, as it is to watch. Zora, after wielding an improvised weapon in a desperate, defensive rage, wiggles her arm in fatigue, as if she’d just completed a household chore. Gabe, challenging the doppelgängers with a metal baseball bat, adopts a stereotypical black-dialect voice as if, by doing so, he could make himself more menacing. Jason, suspicious of his own double (named Pluto), crafts a chess-like strategy leading to results and images of anguished grandeur. There are all kinds of magnificently world-built elements that only make sense in the light of big, late reveals, such as a strange and bloody preview, on the Santa Cruz beach, of the Wilson family’s doubles, and Adelaide’s early success as a dancer (and her double’s ability to use it against her).

This world-building has a stark thematic simplicity that both belies and inspires immense complexity. “Us” is a movie that defies the jigsaw-fit, quasi-academic interpretation that pervades recent criticism. As much as the movie offers a metaphorical vision of the enormities of social and political life, it also offers implications of an inner world, a projection of Peele-iana that maps his personal vision onto that of the world at large—and that, in turn, calls upon viewers to receive that world as intensely and consciously and imaginatively as he tries to do. The results of doing so, he suggests, are intrinsically political, even revolutionary.

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“Get Out”: Jordan Peele’s Radical Cinematic Vision of the World Through a Black Man’s Eyes

By Kyle Chayka

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‘Us’ Review: Jordan Peele’s Creepy Latest Turns a Funhouse Mirror on Us

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‘Us’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Jordan peele narrates a sequence from his film..

“I’m Jordan Peele. I’m the writer, producer, and director of the movie “Us.’” “There’s a family in our driveway.” “So here we have the scene where the tethered family arrives at the Wilson house for the first time. Jason, of course, says “there’s a family in our driveway.” A line designed, giddily, to attempt to be an iconic line, like “they’re here” from the “Poltergeist” movie and sort of help congeal this sense of an Amblin-esque predicament with a black family in the center of it.” - [heavy breathing] “What?” “Zora, give me your phone.” “I’m not on it.” “Zora!” “This is the point in the movie where I want the terror to really kick into a new gear for the audience. One of the techniques that I utilized to get that terror was that all of a sudden we go into real time. The movie before this has been going from some time dashes here and there. When we get into this moment where the four family members are standing holding hands outside, then we go into this sort of fluid — we use a lot of the Steadicam with very few edits. Really trying to subliminally signal to the audience that this sort of relentless, real time event has begun and is taking place.” “Wait, wait, wait, just one sec — Gabe.” “So we see Gabe leave. He goes out. He’s the dad, he’s got to deal with it. This is kind of like — probably pulled from my own anxieties of being a father and realizing, yeah, you got to man up sometimes.” “Hi. Can I help you?” “One of the things in this scene that really inspired me was the scene in “Halloween” where Michael Myers has the ghost sheet over him. And no matter how many questions he’s asked, he just doesn’t respond. The less response you get, the more impending and physical, I think, the threat gets. Probably after the second time someone doesn’t respond, you know one of you’s got to go down. [laughing] “A’ight, I asked you nice. Now I need y’all to get off my property.” “One of the pieces of this scene that works really well is we’ve got Winston to this spot where he’s code switching. You know, he goes back to some of his roots, as it were, to try and intimidate this mysterious family out there. That maybe if sort of reasoning with them doesn’t work, a good old fashioned low register, throwing some bass into his voice, coming out with a little swagger and a bat might work.” “O.K., let’s call the cops.” “Winston is just remarkable in this scene, and the audience really I think is in this tug of war between feeling the tension ratcheting up and the fear of what’s to come and the little bit of a comic relief of watching this kind of goofy dad who’s in over his head.” “Gabe.” “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All right.” “Gabe!” “I got this.”

By Manohla Dargis

March 20, 2019

Jordan Peele’s new horror movie, “Us,” is an expansive philosophical hall of mirrors. Like his 2017 hit, “Get Out,” this daring fun-until-it’s-not shocker starts from the genre’s central premise that everyday life is a wellspring of terrors. In “Get Out,” a young black man meets a group of white people who buy — at auction — younger, healthier black bodies. What makes “Get Out” so powerful is how Peele marshals a classic tale of unwilling bodily possession into a resonant, unsettling metaphor for the sweep of black and white relations in the United States — the U.S., or us.

“Us” is more ambitious than “Get Out,” and in some ways more unsettling. Once again, Peele is exploring existential terrors and the theme of possession, this time through the eerie form of the monstrous doppelgänger. The figure of the troublesome other — of Jekyll and Hyde, of the conscious and unconscious — ripples through the story of an ordinary family, the Wilsons, stalked by murderous doubles. These shadows look like the Wilsons but are frighteningly different, with fixed stares and guttural, animalistic vocalizations. Dressed in matching red coveralls and wielding large scissors (the better to slice and dice), they are funhouse-mirror visions turned nightmares.

The evil twin is a rich, durable motif, and it winds through “Us” from start to finish, beginning with a flashback to 1986 at a Santa Cruz, Calif., amusement park. There, a young girl (the expressive Madison Curry) and her parents are leisurely wandering the park. The girl is itsy-bitsy (the camera sticks close to her so that everything looms), and she and her parents maintain a chilly, near-geometric distance from one another. She’s clutching a perfect candied apple, a portentous splash of red and a witty emblem both of Halloween and Edenic forbidden fruit. Movies are journeys into knowledge, and what the girl knows is part of the simmering mystery.

The Wilsons, a family of four headed by Adelaide (a dazzling Lupita Nyong’o) and Gabe (Winston Duke), enter many years later, introduced with an aerial sweep of greenery. The bird’s-eye view (or god’s-eye, given the movie’s metaphysical reach) evokes the opener of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” a film Peele references throughout. A true cinephile, Peele scatters “Us” with nods and allusions to old-school 1970s and ’80s movies including “Goonies,” “Jaws,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” (One disturbing scene suggests that he’s also a fan of Michael Haneke.) But “The Shining” — another story of a grotesquely haunted family — serves as his most obvious guiding star, narratively and visually.

[Read about Lupita Nyong’o and her work on the movie.]

Peele likes to mix tones and moods, and as he did in “Get Out,” he uses broad humor both for delay and deflection. There’s a cryptic opener and an equally enigmatic credit sequence, but soon the Wilsons are laughing at their vacation home. It’s a breather that Peele uses for light jokes and intimacy (Duke’s amiable performance provides levity and warmth) while he scatters narrative bread crumbs. There’s a beach trip with another family, this one headed by Kitty (a fantastic Elisabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker), who have teenage twin girls (cue “The Shining”). At last, the movie jumps to kinetic life with the appearance of the Wilsons’ doubles, who descend in a brutal home invasion.

The assault is a master class of precision-timed scares filled with light shivers and deeper, reverberant frights. Working within the house’s tight, angled spaces — soon filled with fluid camerawork and bodies moving to dramatically different beats — Peele turns this domestic space into a double of the funhouse that loomed in the amusement park. After much scrambling and shrieking, the Wilsons and their weird twins face off in the living room, mirroring one another. Adelaide’s shadow, Red (the actors play their doubles), takes charge and splits up the Wilsons, ordering her husband, daughter and son to take charge of their terrified others while she remains with Adelaide.

[ Read Jason Zinoman’s essay on why this is the golden age of grown-up horror. ]

A vibrant, appealing screen presence, Nyong’o brings a tremendous range and depth of feeling to both characters, who she individualizes with such clarity and lapidary detail that they aren’t just distinct beings; they feel as if they were being inhabited by different actors. She gives each a specific walk and sharply opposite gestures and voices (maternally silky vs. monstrously raspy). Adelaide, who studied ballet, moves gracefully and, when need be, rapidly (she racks up miles); Red moves as if keeping time to a metronome, with the staccato, mechanical step and head turns of an automaton. Both have ramrod posture and large unblinking eyes. Red’s mouth is a monstrous abyss.

The confrontation between Adelaide and Red testifies to Peele’s strength with actors — here, he makes the most of Nyong’o’s dueling turns — but, once Red starts explaining things, it also telegraphs the story’s weakness. “Us” is Peele’s second movie, but as his ideas pile up — and the doubles and their terrors expand — it starts to feel like his second and third combined. One of the pleasures of “Get Out” was its conceptual and narrative elegance, a streamlining that makes it feel shorter than its one hour 44 minutes. “Us” runs a little longer, but its surfeit of stuff — its cinephilia, bunnies of doom, sharp political detours and less-successful mythmaking — can make it feel unproductively cluttered.

Peele’s boldest, most exciting and shaky conceptual move in “Us” is to yoke the American present with the past, first by invoking the 1986 super-event Hands Across America. A very ’80s charity drive (one of its organizers helped create the ’85 benefit hit “We Are the World” ), it had Americans holding hands from coast to coast, making a human chain meant to fight hunger and homelessness. President Reagan held hands in front of the White House even while his administration was criticized for cutting billions for programs to help the homeless.

In “Us,” the appearance of unity — in a nation, in a person — doesn’t last long before being ripped away like one of the movie’s masks. Peele piles on (and tears off) the masks and the metaphors, tethers the past to the present and draws a line between the Reagan and Trump presidencies, suggesting that we were, and remain, one nation profoundly divisible. He also busies up his story with too many details, explanations and cutaways. Peele’s problem isn’t that he’s ambitious; he is, blissfully. But he also feels like an artist who has been waiting a very long time to say a great deal, and here he steps on, and muddles, his material, including in a fight that dilutes even Nyong’o’s best efforts.

Early on, Peele drops in some text about the existence of abandoned tunnels, mines and subways in the United States. I flashed on Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Underground Railroad,” which literalizes the network of safe houses and routes used by enslaved black Americans, turning it into a fantastical subterranean passageway to freedom. In “Us,” Peele uses the metaphor of the divided self to explore what lies beneath contemporary America, its double consciousness, its identity, sins and terrors. The results are messy, brilliant, sobering, even bleak — the final scene is a gut punch delivered with a queasy smile — but Jordan Peele isn’t here just to play.

Us Rated R for horror violence, featuring scissors and a pesky boat motor. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes.

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Movie Reviews

When you meet the enemy, and it is 'us'.

Scott Tobias

Measure Twice ...: Lupita Nyong'o stars in Us, the latest horror film written and directed by Jordan Peele. Claudette Barius/Universal Pictures hide caption

Measure Twice ...: Lupita Nyong'o stars in Us, the latest horror film written and directed by Jordan Peele.

There's so much to admire about Us , Jordan Peele's muscular follow-up to Get Out , that it's worth appreciating what Peele does when the ebb-and-flow of horror tension reaches low tide. Many of the most celebrated horror maestros are hailed for their big, atmospheric set-pieces, but getting to those moments can often feel like crude narrative patchwork, the listless verses before a killer chorus. Peele excels in these obligatory sections, where his skills as a sketch comedy writer and pop-culture savant can liven up conversations that we've been conditioned to expect as the yadda-yadda bridging to nightfall, when a film can finally uncork some suspense and mayhem.

There's mayhem aplenty to be uncorked in Us , which is as conceptually messy as Get Out was ruthlessly self-contained, but Peele's quick evolution into a full-service entertainer dispels any fears of a sophomore slump. He can deftly mix-and-match ideas cherry-picked from past classics — the echoing childhood trauma of Don't Look Now , the alien doppelgängers of Invasion of the Body Snatchers , the masked home-invasion of The Strangers — but he can also handle the banalities of a family car trip to the beach or underscore a gruesome sequence with the theremin whistle of the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations." He's actively engaged at every moment, which is especially helpful when the film's bold abstractions start to wriggle away from it a little.

Code Switch

The horror, the horror: "get out" and the place of race in scary movies.

'Get Out' Offers Sharp Satire Along With The Scares

Where Get Out turned a Stepford Wives premise into a bitterly satirical allegory for what it's like to be black in America, Us opens up to a broader, vaguer, more suggestive diagnosis of social ills, packaged as a metaphysical shocker where the characters are attacked by versions of themselves. Starting with a flashback in 1986, the film opens with young Adelaide Wilson wandering off from a Santa Cruz boardwalk one stormy summer night and entering a hall of mirrors, where she encounters a child that's her exact reflection—but not. (Think of the famed mirror sequence with Groucho and Harpo Marx in Duck Soup , only utterly bone-chilling.)

Now a grown-up with a husband (Winston Duke) and two children (Evan Alex and Shahadi Wright Joseph) of her own, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) vacations to a secluded home near Santa Cruz and immediately seizes up with panic, as memories of this past trauma bleed insidiously into the present. Seemingly innocuous visual cues land with such a devastating impact that Adelaide pleads with her husband to split town even before a more tangible threat arrives. But as they're preparing to leave, another family of four arrives on their driveway, dressed in matching red jumpsuits. They also happen to look exactly like they do, making them literally their own worst enemy.

There's an explanation for this curious phenomenon — a big one, in fact, connected to a network of tunnels cited in the opening titles — but Peele is asking America herself (the Us or U.S. of the title) to look itself in the mirror and consider the destinies of those invisible millions who share our country, but not always our good fortune. The deeper the film goes into accounting for what's really happening, the less it holds up under scrutiny, both in the logistics of the doppelgängers' existence and in the abstract themes Peele appears to be exploring. That's not as damaging to the film as it sounds, but Us plays better as an intuitive experience than a puzzle box where every question has an answer. Peele would rather tease the imagination than tidy things up.

In that respect, Us is a leap forward for Peele as a director, because so much of what he's trying to express doesn't make sense on the page, as Get Out did. In a stunning dual performance as Adelaide and her gravel-voiced other, Lupita Nyong'o carries the psychological complexities of a woman whose identity was shattered by an incident over 30 years earlier and who still gets cut by the shards. What's happening to her is fundamentally inexplicable and unresolvable, so Peele allows that chasm to open up and swallow the rest of the film whole, like a crack in the earth that portends the apocalypse.

It's also possible to receive Us simply as a gripping home invasion thriller, with Adelaide and her family squaring off against these uncanny, relentless attackers whose origins and motives are a mystery. Though Peele has made it emphatically clear that Us is a horror film, not a comedy — the film itself makes the case just fine on its own, frankly — he seizes the opportunity to lighten up the tone, whether through a funny gesture in the middle of a skirmish or through the casting of Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss as a bourgeois couple who seem to be staging their own version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? . Us is a serious film about the American underclass, those who toil out of sight and out of mind. Us is also a lot of fun.

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‘us’: film review | sxsw 2019.

Jordan Peele follows 'Get Out' with 'Us,' a horror film starring Lupita Nyong'o in which the monsters look just like the heroes.

By John DeFore

John DeFore

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“We’re Americans.”

That single line will be the portal through which Jordan Peele ‘s fans might seek sociopolitical meaning in Us , an often terrifying thriller whose fantastical premise isn’t nearly as easy to read allegorically as that of his shockingly good debut, Get Out . Clearly the work of an ambitious writer-director who can see himself inheriting the mantle of Rod Serling (the Peele-hosted Twilight Zone reboot launches in less than a month), it offers twists and ironies and false endings galore — along with more laughs than the comedian-turned-auteur dared to include in his debut film. Though probably more commercially limited by its genre than its hard-to-pigeonhole predecessor, it packs a punch.

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Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’ Will Haunt You

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

It’s scary as hell, and that’s just for starters. But Us , the new mesmerizing mindbender from writer-director-producer Jordan Peele , also carries the weight of expectation. Get Out , Peele’s smashing debut from 2017, was a brilliantly caustic satire of race division in America that won Peele an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (he’s the first African-American to triumph in that category) and became a phenom with critics and audiences. How can Peele top that? Short answer: he can’t and doesn’t. In interviews , Peele insists that Us is a straight-up horror show. Not really. Leave it to Peele to blaze a trail by putting a black family smack in the middle of a commercial thriller-diller. That’s more than a novelty, it’s a quiet revolution. And Peele’s hints at the larger conspiracies of race, class and social violence festering inside the American dream resonate darkly. Ding Peele all you want for taking on more than he can comfortably handle, but this 40-year-old from New York who started as one half of the sketch-comedy team of Key & Peele is now shaping up as a world-class filmmaker. Flaws and all, Us has the power to haunt your waking dreams. You won’t be able to stop talking about it.

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Critics, in mortal fear of the spoiler police, need to shut the fuck up. Or at least tread carefully as Peele introduces the Wilson family of sunny California. Mom Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), dad Gabe (Winston Duke) and their two kids — Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex) — are on vacation in Santa Cruz. Gabe has an unspoken competition with his friends the Tylers (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker), a white couple with twin daughters given to conspicuous consumption. Everyone is up for a fun time, especially dad (the excellent Duke — looking much like Peele — gets laughs in the unlikeliest places). But Adelaide is not feeling it. In a chilling prologue, set in 1986, we see Adelaide as a child getting majorly freaked out by a trip to a beachside funhouse containing a hall of mirrors. Now the grown Adelaide is back on the same beach where she was traumatized as a child, and she’s taking her own children along. You can cut the foreboding with a knife — or a pair of gold scissors.

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Scissors figure prominently when the Wilsons are confronted in their driveway by unexpected visitors. Since the scene is included in the film’s trailer, I’m not giving away anything to note that these home invaders — clad in red — are exact doubles of the four Wilsons. And the scissors these zombie-like doppelgängers carry are meant to slit throats. “What the hell are you?” asks Gabe. The answer is croaked out by Adelaide’s evil twin (the only double who speaks) in a voice that induces shudders: “We’re Americans.”

The political implications of that genuinely creepy setup are tantalizing, as are the film’s allusions to Hands Across America — the 1986 event in which a human chain of millions was formed to help alleviate poverty and hunger — and the thousands of miles of empty tunnels that run under the continental United States, including the Underground Railroad that symbolizes African enslavement. Is Peele referencing the Sunken Place of the Trump era in which the new gospel preaches fear of the other? If so, the theme remains frustratingly undeveloped. Yet Peele, the supreme cinema stylist, is on a roll. The violence is unnerving as the doubles set out to untether themselves from their human counterparts. By necessity,the Wilsons become a family that kills together. Even the Tylers get invaded. Kudos to Moss, who takes a small role and runs with it. The scene in which her character’s wild-eyed double smears on lip gloss is an unforgettable blend of mirth and menace.

Still, the acting honors in Us go to Nyong’o, who is actually playing two roles, one as protective mother and another as predator. She is superb as both. And what she does with her voice as Adelaide’s double is impossible to shake. Nyong’o, already an Oscar winner for Twelve Years a Slave , should be in the running again for delivering one of the great performances in horror movie history, right up there with Sissy Spacek in Carrie and Jack Nicholson in The Shining .

Peele, an unapologetic horror fanatic, nods to those films and dozens more in Us , including Invasion of the Body Snatchers , Jaws and Michael Jackson’s Thriller . Yet his style is completely his own, as assured as it is ambitious. With the help of cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, up to his It Follows mischief, and a score by Get Out composer Michael Abels that is built to shatter your nerves, the action never lets up. The Beach Boys anthem “Good Vibrations” is featured in the mix, as is “I Got 5 On It” by the hip-hop duo Luniz. You’ll never be able to hear those songs again in the same way.

SXSW 2019: Jordan Peele's 'Us' Is Terrifying

The first time: jordan peele, jane schoenbrun is flipping the script in horror.

There are times when Us plays like an extended and exceptional episode of The Twilight Zone , the 1950’s TV series revived next month on CBS All Access and hosted by Peele in Rod Serling mode. But Peele can’t stop himself from reaching higher and cutting deeper. The twisty road he takes us on opens itself to many interpretations. There are times when the film grips us with such hallucinatory terror that you may think it’s another of Adelaide’s PTSD-induced nightmares. Maybe it is. Or maybe it’s a ghastly reflection of the way we live now. Peele uses a Biblical quote from Jeremiah 11:11 that suggests even God has turned his back on us. What is never in doubt is that Peele is using the scare genre to show us a world tragically untethered to its own humanity, its empathy, its soul. If that’s not a horror film for its time, I don’t know what is.

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‘A horrified double-take in the mirror of certainty’ ... Us

Us review – Jordan Peele's brash and brilliant beach holiday horror

Peele’s follow-up to Get Out is a superb doppelganger satire of the American dream, with Lupita Nyong’o delivering a magnificent performance

A n almost erotic surge of dread powers this brash and spectacular new horror-comedy from Jordan Peele , right from its ineffably creepy opening. It’s a satirical doppelganger nightmare of the American way, a horrified double-take in the mirror of certainty, a realisation that the corroborative image of happiness and prosperity you hoped to see has turned its back, like something by Magritte. And though this doesn’t quite have the same lethal narrative discipline of Peele’s debut masterpiece Get Out, with its drum-tight clarity and control, what it certainly does have is a magnificent lead performance from Lupita Nyong’o, who brings to it a basilisk stare of horror. The musical score by Michael Abels has the same disturbing “Satan spiritual” feel of his compositions for Get Out.

This is a Twilight Zone chiller with something of John Frankenheimer or George A Romero. It opens with a playful borrowing from the spirit and the letter of Spielberg’s Jaws and there’s a horribly prescient invocation of Michael Jackson. The title is of course ambiguous: meaning either the snugly inclusive “us” or the US itself. ( An RSC group-devised play about Vietnam in 1966 directed by Peter Brook had the same title and the same double-edged meaning.)

Nyong’o plays Adelaide, who with her genial, good-natured husband Gabe (Winston Duke) is taking the kids for a summer lakehouse vacation: this is Zora and younger brother Jason, in which roles Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex are both excellent. The family is in a handsomely appointed cabin, which they have stayed in before, but Gabe is discontented. He wants to drive a little further down to the coast for some old-fashioned family time at the beach. Adelaide is not so sure. It was at this very beach resort that she had a horrible experience when she was a child – in 1986, the Reaganite era of the optimistic Hands Across America charity campaign. While with her parents at the funfair, right after her dad had won her a Michael Jackson T-shirt, little Adelaide had wandered off on her own and had a terrible ordeal. Now, as an adult, she is terrified of her own children straying from her and being “taken”. And she has cause to remember a sickening detail: a strange man on the pier holding a sign with the biblical reference – Jeremiah 11:11 .

The traumatised memory has stayed with her, although she has never spoken about it, and being back at this cursed place makes her jittery and on edge. On the beach, they are reunited with a somewhat jaded white couple, the Tylers (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker), who annoy Gabe by showing off about being just that little bit richer. Their cabin is flashier, his car is a cooler model than Gabe’s and their rented boat seems in better shape. (Gabe’s is called “Craw Daddy”; the Tylers’ is toe-curlingly called “B’Yacht’ch”.) And so Adelaide and Gabe’s compromised family happiness, with its tingling undertow of material and personal disquiet, is shattered one night when they see a group of four people standing in their driveway, a group which seems eerily familiar.

Impostor syndrome is something that afflicts people who have fought their way up to a position of some prestige, while never quite being able to suppress the feeling that they don’t deserve it, that they are just fakes, and that they are taking up a space that should be filled by someone more deserving. Is that partly what Us is about: a whole nation of people who each feel a shadow of historical rebuke behind them? Or perhaps the impostors are coming back to grab everything back, having just been deposed? The demonic invaders seem to be attacking from below and at the height of the horror and mayhem, Gabe and Adelaide briefly discuss the possibility of escaping to Mexico, before deciding they are much better off where they are. Perhaps if America was in dispute with Canada, we would be getting a zeitgeisty horror-thriller about Americans getting attacked from above.

Yet perhaps these lines of interpretation are beside the point and what is important is the attack from within. It leads to uproarious scenes of chaos, as Gabe shouts to the invaders: “If you wanna get crazy, we can get crazy” – and crazy is certainly what they get, especially in the outrageous fight scene, which makes shrewd use of the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations and NWA’s Fuck tha Police.

The fiercely charismatic, mesmeric gaze of Lupita Nyong’o holds the movie together, and I have to say that without her presence, the movie’s final spasm of anarchic weirdness might have lost its grip. She radiates a force-field of pure defiance.

Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
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Jordan Peele
Lupita Nyong'o

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‘Us’ Is a Horror Movie. It Works Hard to Be So Much More.

Jordan Peele’s follow-up to ‘Get Out’ is, in some ways, a terrifying leap forward for the writer-director. But it isn’t quite as ingeniously conceived as his debut.

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There is a passage in Stephen King’s Misery in which the protagonist, a best-selling novelist who is to some extent a double for King himself, explains the difference between Getting an Idea and Trying to Have an Idea. It’s the difference between inspiration and perspiration; between a concept so ingenious it all but writes itself and the more exhaustive process of chipping away at a big chunk of creative block until it resembles something else.

I thought about these distinctions while watching Jordan Peele’s new thriller Us , which feels very much like the work of a filmmaker Trying to Have an Idea, or, more specifically, trying to have an idea as good as his last one. With Get Out , the director hit upon a premise so simple and audacious that the movie attached to it proceeded immediately into the canon. It’s not just that Peele came up with the metaphor of the Sunken Place, but that he seemed to be operating from somewhere equally deep and primal, channeling something oceanic from the collective unconscious and distilling it through a fine-grained filter of comedy and social commentary. Get Out wasn’t flawless, but it was major; in its best moments, it made viewers feel the helpless, bottomless undertow of a nightmare.

Us is a more skillful and technically virtuosic piece of work than Get Out , which was thriftily produced around its priceless high concept. Emboldened by a dizzyingly high return on investment and an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay , Peele now gives off the signs of an artist feeling himself. His increased command of horror-movie rhythms and conventions is supplemented by a greater willingness to mess with them. He continues to demonstrate a knack for integrating shock and humor; he understands that one can heighten the other. And yet for all of its choked, breathless atmosphere, satisfyingly gratuitous gore, and strategically deployed symbolism—a dense weave including ominous Bible verses, Hands Across America , creepy carnival rides, enigmatic rabbits, and insinuating vintage hip-hop cues (the Luniz revival starts here) —the film never achieves the startling dramatic or thematic clarity of its predecessor. The best horror movies impart a sense of reality shedding its skin to reveal what lies beneath. With Us , it’s as if Peele is determined to keep adding layers instead of stripping them away.

By now, you probably know the basic setup of Us , which is about a fateful family trip to a seaside holiday town—or actually, in the spirit of the film’s obsession with doubling, two trips, 30 years apart. What links them is the presence of Adelaide, played as a child by Madison Curry and as a grown-up by Lupita Nyong’o; the adult incarnation has more screen time, but the film’s power and tension derives from the impression left by the younger version. In a superbly scary prologue that lowers the temperature even on Get Out ’s chilling cold open, we see Adelaide wander away from her parents on a Santa Cruz boardwalk and enter a hall of mirrors, where she encounters something uncanny amid the panoply of distorted reflections: a doppelganger trapped behind (or is it within?) the glass.

Here, Peele takes several well-worn clichés—a dark, deserted house, an isolated child, an evil twin—and exploits them for maximum effect while still cultivating a sense of mystery. Not only are we left in the dark (literally) about what, exactly, happens to Adelaide, the why is left hanging as well, and not just for the audience. More than 30 years later, she’s equally haunted by the memory and unsure of its meaning, internalizing her anxiety and keeping it secret from her husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), high-school-age daughter, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and young son, Jason (Evan Alex). Returning to the scene of the crime—or whatever it is that happened—as a wife and mother, she reverts to the tentative, wide-eyed demeanor of a frightened child. We wonder whether we’re watching a story about a woman at the mercy of her own trauma and whether whatever she’s got bottled up inside is about to come bursting to the surface in a dangerous way.

It does and it doesn’t: Adelaide isn’t the monster lurking in the shadows outside their cottage, but at the same time, she is. Given what the film’s trailers show, it’s not a spoiler to reveal that, approximately half an hour into Us , the main characters are confronted with bizarro versions of themselves, clad— Don’t Look Now– style—in institutional red jumpsuits and seemingly determined to terrorize, torture, murder, and supplant their opposite numbers. The extended set piece in which the doubles first appear conjures memories of other home-invasion thrillers from The Strangers to Funny Games , yet we’re still fully discombobulated, both by how quickly the film seems to be revealing its gimmick and the outrageousness of Nyong’o’s second performance as Adelaide’s opposite number, all quick, feral movements and dead-eyed stares, topped off by a voice that turns every line of dialogue into a strained incantation. The situation is visually arresting, psychologically unsettling, and completely surreal, and then Peele tries to lower the boom. “Who are you people?” asks Gabe. “We are Americans,” replies the other Adelaide, who’s known as Red, and we’re off to the races, allegorically speaking.

You don’t have to be a clever film critic to note the double entendre of the film’s title, in which Us can easily be reworked into “U.S.,” and you don’t have to follow that particular trail of semiotic bread crumbs to enjoy a movie that, from that moment forward, plays out, on the most basic level, as a straightforward and satisfying jolt machine, with our heroes battling their doubles while also gradually coming to terms with a larger catastrophe unfolding across the entire community. “ Us is a horror movie,” Peele tweeted a few weeks ago, kidding the controversy over Get Out ’s scoring Golden Globe nominations in the Best Motion Picture—Musical or Comedy category while also trying to get out ahead of reviewers who might try to elevate his movie into something more pretentious than that. PR-wise, it was a good move, but if critics or audiences end up overthinking Us instead of just enjoying it, it’s only because they’re following Peele’s lead, starting with that short, blunt line of dialogue, which instantly shifts the film’s emphasis from the personal to the political, suggesting a country divided between its everyday citizenry and a shadowy faction trying to take its place at the table.

In interviews about Get Out , Peele admitted that after the election of Donald Trump, he just didn’t have the heart to stick with his script’s original ending, which saw Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris incarcerated for the murder of the Armitage family. It’s too bad, too: By presenting prison as a variation on the Sunken Place, Peele was paying off his script’s central metaphor and honoring a tradition of bleakness inaugurated by the coda of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (a finale evoked directly by the staging of Get Out ’s climax). One way to read the complex subtext of Us , with its vague but unmistakable intimations of a culture war between haves and have-nots, is as a nihilistic corrective to Get Out ’s relative optimism—as a sign that Peele has gotten that much more “serious.” At the same time, in trying to go that much further, Us shows palpable signs of fatigue, especially in a third act that comes heavily overburdened with exposition. The issue isn’t just that the explanations Peele offers about what Nyong’o’s monstrous twin calls “the Tethering” are fussy and convoluted in ways that Get Out ’s bizarre, hilarious instructional video about the “Coagula” was not, but that he’s so insistent on explaining in the first place, as if he doesn’t want anybody to miss out on the big ideas he’s so evidently been trying to have.

The paradox is that the larger Us gets, the broader it goes with both the history and implications of the “Tethering,” and the more it tries to fill out the potential national allegory suggested by that “we are Americans” one-liner, the more it shrinks and starts to feel self-contained, even in its vagueness. Similarly, the more we learn about Adelaide and her doppleganger, the less unnerving the prologue’s vision of an unexpected encounter with the self becomes, although that’s no fault of Nyong’o, who plays the hell out of both roles, leveraging Adelaide’s hellacious, protective maternal resourcefulness against the vacant but calculating cruelty of her other self and finding vivid, provocative points of crossover in addition to the obvious physical and behavioral contrasts. The other actors are all strong as well, with Duke putting a witty spin on the archetype of the hipster dad and Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss contributing expert Caucasian caricatures as an unhappy couple staying a little farther down the shore, who, as it turns out, are no less implicated in what’s going on than Adelaide and her family.

Coming out of the screening, a friend said that Us would probably seem better if Peele’s name wasn’t on it, which is true enough and speaks to the difficulty of following up a classic. I’d also probably have liked Us ’s striking, slow-burn final image more if I didn’t suspect that it’s been partially lifted from a recent, critically acclaimed American thriller (hint: it’s directed by Karyn Kusama and is set mostly at a dinner party) or if the God’s-eye widescreen grandeur of the composition felt earned rather than imposed. In an interview with The Ringer’s Sean Fennessey , Peele called Us “ a bit of a Rorschach,” and yet I think a mirror ultimately is a better analogy. Not because of what it is so obviously trying to reflect and refract about its particular time and place, but because its mix of skill and strain compels us to work almost as hard as Peele to Try to Have an Idea about what it all means. Ideally, watching Us , we’d see ourselves, and some viewers may well have those moments of recognition. What I see is a talented guy going for broke and, for better and for worse, getting there.

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What is Jordan Peele's 'Us' about? And how scary is it?

Watching a Jordan Peele film is a uniquely unsettling experience.

This is not just because “Get Out,” his brilliant debut, and now “Us,” are smart-and-scary horror movies. It is also because, after all the clues he dropped like so many breadcrumbs in “Get Out,” you cannot simply sit back and watch “Us.” You find yourself endlessly searching for hints, for tidbits, for the at-first-glance throwaway image that ultimately will unlock the secrets of the story.

It’s relentless — and it’s thrilling.

Which is not to say that “Us” is the equal of “Get Out.” Few films are.

But “Us” is a strong film in its own right, a sign of Peele’s confidence as a filmmaker (here he tackles class division, in a different way than he did racism in “Get Out”). It’s also a sign that we can be confident he’ll make us think while making us squirm.

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And maybe scream a little.

“Us” begins in 1986, at night at a carnival on the boardwalk on the beach in Santa Cruz, California. A little girl wanders from her father, who is drinking beer and playing Whac-A-Mole. She walks almost trance-like to the beach, and winds up in a fun-house, hall-of-mirrors-type attraction.

Lost inside, she sees something that will haunt her for the rest of her life (and eventually haunt the audience).

Then we’re in the present, with the girl, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) grown up, married to Gabe (Winston Duke), with a daughter, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and son Jason (Evan Alex). They’re on the way to their summer home in … Santa Cruz. (If cinematographer Mike Gioulakis’ overhead shot of the family driving to their vacation isn’t meant to evoke the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” it’s a happy accident.)

Adelaide really doesn’t want to go to the beach, but Gabe, an amiable goof, talks her into it. They meet their friends Josh and Kitty (Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss) and their twin daughters, a family just a little more well-off enough to bug Gabe. A couple of unusual things happen, enough to rattle Adelaide. Peele, who wrote and produced the film, in addition to directing it, periodically flashes back to the night in 1986 that so shaped her life.

That night, the power goes out in their vacation home (Josh and Kitty have a backup generator, Gabe notes with annoyance), and Jason comes into his parents’ room with alarm: There is a family standing in their driveway.

It’s not just any family; if you’ve seen the trailer, you know that it’s them, or their doppelgängers. The film for a time becomes an exercise in home-invasion horror — something at which Peele excels. (There are nods to several horror films here, recognizable but never overwhelming Peele’s unique vision.)

There are many surprises to follow, and many more scares, but underlying everything is a message — a warning, really — pitting the haves vs. the have-nots, a class division that has broken out into full-on class warfare. The reasons for this grow a little fuzzy as Peele tries to explain things late in the game; that part of the film isn’t entirely successful, though it certainly doesn’t lack for ambition.

The acting is fantastic — playing dual roles is doubtless an actor’s dream. But Nyong’o is particularly outstanding. Peele relies on her to carry the film, both as a kind of action hero and her own worst enemy, and if you’re looking for a message there, well, you can find one.

Peele’s visual audacity is at times breathtaking, and always serves a greater purpose. There is a beautiful overhead shot of the family walking along the beach, carrying their supplies, casting long shadows. There’s no way to know in the moment you’re admiring this that it carries meaning that informs the rest of the film.

That’s just terrific filmmaking. And even if “Us” can’t match the standard Peele set with “Get Out,” it’s another reason to be excited about whatever he comes up with next.

Reach Goodykoontz at [email protected] . Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm . Twitter: @goodyk .

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'Us,' 4 stars

Director: Jordan Peele.

Cast: Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss.

Rating: R for violence/terror and language.

Great ★★★★★ Good ★★★★

Fair ★★★ Bad ★★ Bomb ★

clock This article was published more than 5 years ago

Jordan Peele’s follow-up to ‘Get Out’ will give you nightmares. But in ‘Us,’ it’s the performances that you’ll remember.

‘Us,” Jordan Peele’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to his smash hit “ Get Out ,” can’t help but be compared with that earlier movie. As a politically minded genre exercise combining horror and humor, it’s utterly of a piece with Peele’s obvious fascination with cinematic grammar at its most ritualized and predictable, and what happens when you give it a swift kick in the social conscience.

In “Get Out,” Peele created a creepy, eerily effective reality-adjacent world in which racial animus and envy played out against “Stepford”-like perfection. In “Us,” the setting is a more recognizable present-day America, in which a happy, well-adjusted family is thrust into existential battle with mysterious, suddenly ubiquitous forces. Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke play Adelaide and Gabe Wilson, who with their kids Zora and Jason (Shahadi Wright Joseph, Evan Alex) plan to spend a week or two at the family beach house in Santa Cruz, Calif. Gabe and the kids are excited — he just bought a boat and they can’t wait to hit the beach — but Addie is bothered by a creeping sense of unease she can’t shake, even when they meet up with their friends Josh and Kitty (Tim Heidecker, Elisabeth Moss). Usually a luminous, delicate presence on-screen, Nyong’o here is hooded and wary, her jumpy movements and mistrustful glances darting out from under a curtain of twisted ringlets in her hair. Her entire physicality is one of worry and foreboding, an air of impending doom that is telegraphed by a man carrying a “Jeremiah 11:11” sign in the film’s disquieting prologue.

Thanks to that opening sequence, a flashback to a traumatic event in Addie’s youth, viewers have a dim sense of what’s bugging her. But it isn’t until four strangers invade the Wilsons’ cozy getaway that the truth is revealed. Taking a page from “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” here and the current “Purge” franchise there, Peele creates a tense, terror-filled domestic drama that becomes more brutal and bone-shattering as its life-and-death story unravels. As in “Get Out,” he proves as adept with goofy jokes as in stoking fear. In “Us,” however, the balance is far more in favor of blood and gore, with the humor showing up as brief, albeit sharply effective, trace elements.

All by way of saying that the audience’s enjoyment of “Us” is far more dependent on their love of scary movies than on pointed satire, which “Get Out” blended with such elegant finesse. Peele still wants to work out serious ideas in this movie — about inequality, materialism, envy and disenfranchisement — but they’re far more bluntly expressed. Both simplistic and overcomplicated, “Us” depends on some of horror’s most hackneyed cliches and gaps in logic — by now, shouldn’t all movie characters know never to go back into the house and to always stay together? — as well as a few windy speeches explaining why bizarre things keep happening. The viewer begins to wish that Peele had given his script one more pass, either to pare it down or beef it up.

As it stands, “Us” turns out to be an uneven, if intriguing, affair, one that engages a current pop culture interest in doubles (“Orphan Black,” “Counterpart”) and parallel universes (“Westworld”). Peele loads his movie with recurring motifs, not only in the form of that biblical quote, but also spiders and rabbits ( so many rabbits ). The symbolism is far from the most interesting thing about the film, though, and it ultimately collapses under the metaphorical weight.

Much more compelling are the performances, which are consistently excellent throughout “Us,” from Duke’s bearish sweetness to Moss and Heidecker’s hammily enjoyable turn as a bickering couple from hell. One of the film’s chief weaknesses is that there isn’t more interaction between the two couples. But it’s Nyong’o who is most memorable and astonishing in “Us,” delivering a strange, mannered performance whose weirdest details become clearly motivated once Addie’s complicated history comes to light. Watchful one moment, monstrous the next, Nyong’o is a force of nature throughout a film that suggests the doppel-apocalypse is right under our collective nose. Full disclosure: “Us” gave me real-life nightmares, a testament to Peele’s ability to illuminate the deepest and most dangerous shadow material of the American Dream.

R. At area theaters. Contains violence, terror and crude language. 116 minutes.

Jordan Peele’s Us — and its ending — explained. Sort of.

The new movie’s conclusion is one elastic metaphor after another. That’s what makes it frustrating. And brilliant.

by Emily St. James

The doubles arrive, and they’re not playing around.

Guess what? Spoilers follow!

First things first: I’m going to give this article a headline that’s something like, “ Us ’s ending, explained” or “ Us ’s ending, dissected,” and I should tell you upfront that I’m not going to explain Us ’s ending. I can’t.

Jordan Peele’s second film has an ending that dares you to bring what you think to it. Where the ending of his first film, Get Out (for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay), was a series of puzzle pieces snapping into place, Us ends in a way that causes the film’s structure to sprawl endlessly. It’s five different puzzles mixed up in the same box, and you only have about 75 percent of the pieces for any of them at best.

Us is Jordan Peele’s thrilling, blood-curdling allegory about a self-destructing America

But I found that approach incredibly engaging. The audience leaving my screening the other night seemed sharply divided on the film — and its last-minute twist — but I plunged deeper and deeper into it because of that messy, glorious ending.

So let’s talk first about what happens in that ending and how we could read that ending, and then try to find a way to synthesize all of these ideas.

What happens at the end of Us

Us breaks evenly into a classic three-act structure. The first act is all unsettling setup — first with a flashback to our protagonist, Adelaide ( Lupita Nyong’o ), as a young girl, meeting an eerie mirror version of herself, then to the first few days of a family vacation that she takes with her husband ( Winston Duke ) and kids as an adult. The second act follows Adelaide’s and her family’s actions after being menaced by horrifying double versions of themselves — played by the same actors — over the course of one long, gory night.

The second act — roughly the middle hour of the 116-minute film — is pretty much perfect, the kind of expertly pitched horror comedy we see far too rarely. And all along the way, Peele is seeding in exposition, like when we learn that Adelaide and her family aren’t the only ones being menaced by their doubles (who are called “Tethers” in the film, because they’re tethered to their mirror images), and the film cuts away to the vicious murder of two of their friends ( Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss ) by the friends ’ doubles.

Some of this exposition is stated outright, as when Adelaide’s double, Red, explains exactly who she is and who her compatriots are. Other exposition is mostly implied. (Pay close attention, for instance, to whom the Tethers kill and whom they just maim.) And still other stuff is probably just me reading my own opinions into the movie.

Anyway, the third act begins when the family finally makes it to daylight, having killed two of their doubles, with a third double falling right at the top of Act 3. The only Tether left is Red, who absconds with Adelaide’s son, Jason ( Evan Alex ), and races with him down into a gigantic complex of tunnels that exists beneath the Santa Cruz, California, boardwalk and — it’s implied — the entire country.

The tunnels have the feel of an abandoned military facility more than anything else, and they’re filled with rabbits, which have been set free from cages. (The bunnies are the only food the Tethers get.) This vague military feel tracks with something Red tells Adelaide when the two finally face off in what seems to be a classroom. The Tethers were created by a nebulous “them” to control their other selves.

But the experiment was abandoned for unexplained reasons, leaving the Tethers belowground, mimicking our every movement up here, and living lives where they have no free will, lives entirely dictated by our choices. (The long expository monologue where Red basically explains all of this is the movie’s weakest section and kills its momentum. This was also true of the long expository monologue in Get Out !)

The status quo held until Red and Adelaide met as young girls, and the two begin a fight that’s almost a dance but still recognizably a fight. (Peele intercuts this with footage of the teenage Adelaide — a great ballerina — dancing beautifully as Red replicates her actions in a weirdly grotesque mirror belowground.) Finally, Adelaide overcomes Red and kills her. She finds Jason and exits the tunnels.

But aboveground, the many Tethers have joined hands together in a mirror of Hands Across America , the 1986 event meant to raise money and awareness of hunger, which stretched a 6.5 million-person chain (almost all the way) across the Lower 48. The presence of this massive chain of Tethers should hopefully clue in viewers to the film’s final twist. An ad for Hands Across America is one of the last things little Adelaide sees before she goes to the Santa Cruz boardwalk with her parents — which is where she meets Red and (the final scene reveals) is forced to take Red’s place in the Tether world while Red comes up to ours.

The movie never makes clear whether this is long-buried trauma that Adelaide is resurfacing as she and her family ride off into the new, post-apocalyptic landscape of a world where seemingly millions have been murdered by their doubles and a chain of those doubles stands athwart the continent, or whether it’s something she’s pointedly avoided referencing throughout the film. You can make an argument for either.

The movie leaves you with the twist: Adelaide was Red, and Red was Adelaide, and they switched places as young girls. Jason, somehow, seems to realize this in his mother’s eyes, and he looks worried as the scene cuts to the camera tilting over the hills surrounding Santa Cruz — where a long chain of Tethers stretches, presumably from sea to shining sea.

What’s it all mean?

There is no single meaning to the conclusion of Us , and the beauty of it is how elastic its metaphor is

One of the reasons Get Out took off so readily with online theorists was that every single piece of it was crafted to add up to the film’s central revelation about elderly white people literally possessing the bodies of young black people. It was a potent commentary on racial relations, yes, but Peele seeded hints about the big twist into the plot as well. He had clearly thought through every little detail of the movie’s world.

You can’t really say the same for Us . Every time you think you’ve got the movie pinned down to say, “It’s about this!” it slips away from you. Its central metaphor of meeting a literal evil twin of yourself certainly can be read as a commentary on race, but it’s also a pretty brilliant commentary on class, on capitalism, on gender, and on the lasting effects of trauma or mental illness. You can probably add your own possibilities to this list.

All of these concepts keep informing one another. If you want to read what happens to Red and Adelaide as a commentary on how differently traumatic incidents weigh on children of means versus children who grow up with little money, doing so can support both an interpretation of the film as being about mental illness and one where it’s about class.

What’s more, Us doesn’t seem to want to be read as social commentary in the same way Get Out was. That middle hour is so fun precisely because it never really bothers to stop and make you think about the movie’s deeper themes. It’s too busy killing off Tethers by chewing them up in a boat’s motor.

Now, granted, my experience of Us was pretty different from a lot of folks’ experiences (at least from the people I’ve talked to), because I guessed from the first flashback sequence that Red and Adelaide had switched places as kids. I assumed the movie wanted me to figure this out, because it was essentially the only way the movie’s larger plot — the idea that everybody has a Tether, and not just this specific family — could make any sense. Something had to have caused this breach in reality, and the connection between Adelaide and Red seemed the most likely culprit.

Yet it’s honestly remarkable that the movie works as well as it does when you figure out its big twist early on, because Peele does a terrific job of teasing you in ways that make you think maybe you didn’t figure it out, or that the twist is something else entirely. ( Get Out , after all, didn’t really have “a twist” in the way this movie does, only a reveal that happens before the ending.)

Still, set the twist aside, and let’s take Red at her word when it comes to the origin of the Tethers. Some strange experiment produced them, and now they’re a kind of national id, a barely checked shadow self that every American has. (At one point, when asked who she and her family are, Red croaks, “We’re Americans,” which ... fair.)

The natural pushback to this is — it’s preposterous. By giving so much information but still so little, Peele creates a situation where it feels like he’s going to answer all our questions and then just doesn’t. (Credit where it’s due: I love how accurately the whole third act replicates the experience of falling down a particularly disturbing Wikipedia hole at 3 am, right down to somehow finding yourself reading about Hands Across America .)

And yet ... is the twist that preposterous? I don’t literally have a shadow self, but there’s some other person out there in the country right now who could have had my life and career but, instead, has some less comfortable one because he grew up with parents who didn’t have enough money to send him to college, or because he grew up some race other than white, or because he was born a girl, or ... fill in the blank.

Taking Red at her word means believing in an idea that seems self-evidently kooky, but it’s also an idea that drives much of modern society. Capitalism demands that we cling desperately to what we’ve got, and the fear that some dark underbelly might come and rob us of what little we have is always present.

Yet the very idea of society means we’re all tethered together somehow, and the actions of those of us with power and money often make those without either jerk about on puppet strings, even if we never know how what we do affects our doppelgängers.

And all the while, “they” — whoever “they” are — get richer and richer and more powerful.

Thoughts on a universal read of the ending of Us (with apologies to Stanley Kubrick)

But Us isn’t really “about” capitalism, unless you (like me) want to read that into it. The movie’s metaphor is so elastic that you could easily mount a read of the film that says it’s about climate change or the 2016 election or zombies. (In the scenes set in the underground complex especially, Peele plays off the familiar images of zombie films, like legions of people shuffling about, shadows of some life they should otherwise be living.) And I also want to be clear that if you just want to watch Us as a super-fun horror comedy, it is absolutely possible, and you should do that.

But I think you can get to a kind of universal understanding of Us, one that drills down into what the film is about at its core while still leaving room for the elasticity that allows you to read as much or as little into its central metaphor as you’d like. To get there, we have to look at the hall of mirrors that first brings Adelaide and Red together as kids.

In 1986, the hall of mirrors features a stereotypical painting of an American Indian that sits atop its entrance. The art is offensive in the way all thoughtlessness is. Nobody cared who might be hurt by this painting; they just went ahead and painted it. Peele isn’t digging into one of America’s original sins here in the way he alluded to slavery in Get Out , but the evocation of a terrible genocide is at least there .

In 2019, the hall of mirrors has now, clumsily, been converted into one for Merlin the wizard. The inside is the same. Most of the outside is the same. But the painting of the Indian has been replaced — not particularly convincingly — with a painting of Merlin that’s seemingly just been mounted over the old American Indian one. It’s a really good joke, honestly; it’s a spin on how willing modern America is to gloss over the horrors in its past in the name of simply coming up with some other story entirely.

It’s also key to the movie’s more universal read. The hall of mirrors was constructed in the first place as a distillation of tropes around a racially charged stereotype. Just because it’s now ostensibly about Merlin doesn’t mean that it’s no longer built around those darker ideas. You can’t simply scrub away the darker past by putting a more palatable face on it.

America (okay, this is, like, 99.9999 percent on white America) likes to pretend it’s a country without a grim history, that its self-proclaimed exceptionalism makes it free from anything too dark. But, of course, that’s not true. The hall of mirrors was constructed with an American Indian atop it because whoever built it could be reasonably certain no one would care if it was offensive. Those who might care are mostly sequestered on reservations or died generations ago. And you, if you’re an American, live on the land you live on because they died.

(Sidebar: This could also be a really elaborate riff on Peele’s part on The Shining , another horror movie that is occasionally read by some of its hardcore fans through the lens of America’s general inability to deal with the genocide lurking in its root system. Peele has been dressing like The Shining ’s Jack Torrance on the press tour...)

Now consider Hands Across America. The movement did raise some money for hunger — around $34 million — but much of that was eaten up by operational fees, leaving $15 million to be donated to the actual cause. That isn’t chump change, but it’s a drop in the bucket of the problem of actually trying to fight hunger. Is there anything more American than thinking you’ve solved a problem by creating a gigantic spectacle that accomplishes less than you’d think? Again — something dark is covered up by something glossy, and we celebrate the glossy surface.

Us put me in mind of a book I read recently. In The City in the Middle of the Night , the new novel by science fiction author Charlie Jane Anders, the protagonist, Sophie, meets members of an alien species whose telepathic links mean that they are essentially forced to remember everything that has ever happened, stretching back into their distant past. Even when one member of the species dies, that member’s memories are carried forward by those who knew them, and those memories become part of the collective consciousness.

Anders not only shows just how hard this could be for those who don’t quite feel at home in the collective (those who are dealing with huge emotions that they need to understand privately, say), but she also keenly contrasts this species’ long memory with humanity’s short one. Sophie carries the burdens of decisions made millennia before she was born, back on the massive spaceship that brought her ancestors from Earth to this new planet. Those ancestors were shaped by the decisions that you and I are making right now, even as we’re shaped by decisions made hundreds of years ago, and so on. And many of those decisions are now half-remembered dreams.

It is hard to really deal with this, maybe all but impossible. To really sit and think about all of the ways that you are a product of human history, floating through the immense sweep of time and space, rather than someone who can take control of their life and make a difference, is so dispiriting . So we try to gloss over all of that. We put up paintings of Merlin where once paintings of an Indian stood, and we smile and say, “That’s better.” But the painting is still there, underneath the surface. If the aliens Sophie meets in Anders’s novel are doomed to remember, then we, perhaps, are doomed to forget, to pretend that we are more powerful than we are, simply because we’re alive.

This, I think, is why both Anders’s novel and Us spoke so profoundly to me. To try to escape the past is to try to escape yourself. But to try to escape the past is also deeply, deeply human, because to make any progress, we have to find a way to excuse, forgive, or ignore our own faults, to lock them up in a subterranean basement and hope we don’t remain tethered to them forever. But what a fool’s errand that is.

And this reading of the film’s ending, that it was always about the perils of trying to ignore inconvenient truths when they’re looking right back at you in the mirror, is one that unites every other possible reading of the film, too. Race, gender, class, trauma — they’re all covered by the idea that you can have a great life and be a good person but still unknowingly be causing so much suffering.

All of which is to say, when Jason looks at Adelaide late in this movie, seeing, for the first time, his mother’s true self, he’s not realizing that she’s Red, or that she’s Adelaide, or anything like that. He’s realizing that she is, and always has been, both.

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User reviews

Adelaide Wilson and her family are attacked by mysterious figures dressed in red. Upon closer inspection, the Wilsons realize that the intruders are exact lookalikes of them.
In order to get away from their busy lives, the Wilson family takes a vacation to Santa Cruz, California with the plan of spending time with their friends, the Tyler family. On a day at the beach, their young son Jason almost wanders off, causing his mother Adelaide to become protective of her family. That night, four mysterious people break into Adelaide's childhood home where they're staying. The family is shocked to find out that the intruders look like them, only with grotesque appearances. — jesusblack-30225
Not far from the sun-kissed Santa Cruz beach where a traumatic experience shaped her, Adelaide, now a mother of two, reluctantly returns to the serene lake house of her childhood to spend the summer vacation with her husband. But after all this time, Adelaide still can't shake off the ominous feeling that the terrifying incident will somehow affect her unsuspecting family. And before the end of the day, the happy holidaymakers' worst fears will come true. Now, an evil quartet bearing an uncanny resemblance to them has set foot in their driveway. Then, their sharp scissors enter the picture. What do "they" want from them? — Nick Riganas
A vacationing family and the traumatized mother visit where the mother was attacked on vacation years before on the same boardwalk the same year the movie "Lost Boys" was filmed. While sight seeing, weird occurrences happen and when the power goes out the son of the family informs the parents that a strange family holding hands in the middle of there driveway. The father goes to to tell them to leave but the family splits up and breaks into the Wilson vacation home to attack them. A strong horror film will leave you scared, sad and even laughing at certain points. This film follows Adelaide Wilson and her family and there mission to flee the country from there doppelgängers and survive this apacolypse.
Santa Cruz, California. 1986 A young Adelaide (Madison Curry) goes to the beach on a trip with her parents Rayne and Russell (Anna Diop and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). After Russell wins Adelaide a Michael Jackson 'Thriller' T-shirt at a carnival game and plays Whac-a-Mole, Adelaide wanders off and encounters a homeless man with a Jeremiah 11:11 placard and then walks into a nearby fun-house. Inside, she's terrified by the mirrors and vibe of the place and eventually comes face to face with an exact doppelganger. The incident scares her. Some time later, Adelaide is refusing to talk as her parents worry about her. The therapist tells them to make Adelaide tell her story through the form of anything - reading, writing, or dance. In the present day, an adult Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong'o) goes on a beach trip with her husband Gabe (Winston Duke) and their two children 12-year-old Zora (Shahidi Wright Joseph) and 10-year-old Jason (Evan Alex). While the family has lunch at their beach house, we find out several things - one is that the beach trip was to help the children cope with the death of their grandmother and the other is that Adelaide appears to still be terrified of the idea of going to the beach because of what happened before and refuses to go. After some persuasion, however, she reluctantly agrees to join her family to go to the beach. On the way, the family sees a man being brought into an ambulance - it is the same homeless man that Adelaide encountered many years ago with the Jeremiah 11:11 placard. At the beach, the Wilson family meets their friend the Tylers, comprising of Kitty (Elizabeth Moss), Josh (Tim Heidecker), and their twin teenage daughters Gwen and Maggie (Cali and Noelle Sheldon). While the kids are all at the beach, Kitty and Adelaide talk about Adelaide's soft-spoken nature and her past as a young ballet dancer. Jason soon wanders off on his own and finds a man with his arms stretched out dripping with blood. Adelaide notices her son missing and panicking, eventually finds Jason and decides that it's time for the family to go back to the house. Later that night, after the family settles down, Adelaide tells Gabe all about her childhood trauma and worries that recent events mean that her doppelganger is coming to get her. Gabe tells her not to worry... and almost instantly, the power goes off. As Gabe is about to run the backup generator, Jason alerts the family that there's a family in their driveway. Adelaide quickly calls 9-1-1 while Gabe attempts to scare the family off. Eventually, the family begins entering the Wilson's house, and one of the figures hits Gabe with a baseball bat while everyone else corners them in the living room. Inside the living room, the Wilsons get a better look at the family... and it is all doppelgangers of themselves... all of them wearing red jumpsuits and wielding a pair of scissors. Adelaide's doppelganger tells them of a story of a princess and her shadow and their relationship, before forcing Adelaide to handcuff herself to the table. She then makes Zora run away from the house with her doppelganger in hot pursuit, makes Jason join his to play, and has Gabe's drag him off to a boat. (Note: for posterity's sake, although their names are never explicitly used, the doppelgangers are referred to by their names in the closing credits - Adelaide's is Red, Gabe's is Abraham, Jason's is Pluto, and Zora's is Umbrae.) From this point on, we encounter the family dealing with their doubles in several ways. After running far away, Zora thinks she's outrun her doppelganger Umbrae... only for her to appear on the top of a car. A neighbor spots the commotion and confronts them... but Umbrae murders him with her scissors while Zora escapes. Abraham drags an unconscious Gabe all the way to the family's boat and then places him inside a bag. Gabe eventually awakens and successfully throws Abraham overboard. Later on, however, the boat engine fails, and Gabe falls in the water. He ultimately makes his way back to the boat... only for Abraham to emerge and grab him. After a fight, Gabe manages to turn on the boat's engine in time, completely eviscerating Abraham. Back at the house, Jason leads Pluto inside a closet and notices that he mirrors his actions almost simultaneously. He takes off his mask and finds that the lower half of Pluto's face is burned off. Jason impresses him with a magic trick, but when Pluto demands that he do the trick again, he successfully traps him in the closet and escapes. Meanwhile, Red holds Adelaide hostage in the living room and begins trying to slam her face against the glass table, but the commotion caused by Jason's escape leads her away. In a panic, Adelaide manages to get the fireplace poker, destroys the leg of the table, and get Jason. They are both reunited with Zora and Gabe, and the Wilsons manage to escape on the boat with Red and Pluto watching them. At the Tylers, Kitty thinks she sees something outside. Josh pretends that he does see it, only to reveal that he's just messing with her. The twins then come out of their rooms and talk, and the second they think that everything is alright...a set of doppelgangers wearing red jumpsuits, similar to the Wilsons, all emerge and kill the whole family. When the Wilsons arrive looking for help, Kitty's double drags Adelaide into the house while Gabe attempts to distract Josh's double. After a fight, the Wilsons manage to kill all of the Tylers' doppelgangers and reunite inside the house. The Wilsons turn on the TV and find out from frantic news reports that the red-clad doubles have been inexplicably appearing and killing people all over the world, and have joined together to hold hands (similar to Hands Across America). Gabe wants to take refuge in the house, but Adelaide says they have to keep moving and escape. The family decides to take the Tylers' car, but when Adelaide looks for the key, a still-living Kitty's doppelganger attacks her. She manages to kill her, but when the family gets to the car, Umbrae appears. After a chase sequence, they manage to kill Umbrae when they speed up and abruptly stop the vehicle, causing her to fly into a tree. It is now morning, and the Wilsons get to the boardwalk. At the boardwalk, they see their original car burning with Pluto standing in front. Adelaide decides to get out and walk to him... and soon realizes that it's a trap. Jason acts fast and makes Pluto walk backwards into the burning car, and just as the family thinks it's over, Red grabs Jason. Adelaide runs after them, while Zora and Gabe see that the beach is now full of red-clad doppelgangers joining hands. Adelaide makes her way back to the fun-house and goes all the way down into an underground tunnel with rabbits roaming free. She finds Red inside one of the many rooms, and Red explains her plan. Red says that all this time, the underground facility (presumably a part of the dimension of Hell) has been filled with everyone's doppelgangers, and now it is their time to be on the surface. She says that she has always been a part of Adelaide, and when she was a ballet dancer as a kid, it led her out of the tunnels and into the fun-house where they met. It took her a long time, but a plan was made with everyone in the tunnel which was now being executed. After a fight, Adelaide manages to overpower Red and kills her by impaling her to the fireplace poker and gets Jason back. The family reunites and drives away. All is good, and everyone looks relieved until a quick flashback shows that when "Red" met Adelaide in the fun-house all those years ago, she knocked her out, took her Thriller T-Shirt, and went off into the real world. The "Adelaide" we've been watching for the whole movie is actually the doppelganger, and "Red" was simply the real Adelaide getting her revenge (this also explains why "Red" is the only one of the doubles to have concrete speech while all the other doppelgangers in the film have guttural, animalistic sounds). Jason appears to realize the truth, and puts his mask on uneasily. The film ends with a zoom out showing all the red doppelgangers around the United States joined together, holding hands (similar to Hands Across America), with news and police helicopters surveying them from above.

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Us movie explained: Breaking down the biggest moments and ending

By sandy c. | aug 16, 2023.

Jordan Peele's Us -- Photo Credit: Claudette Barius/Universal Pictures -- Acquired via Image.net

Whether you caught Jordan Peele’s Nope in theaters when it was released on March 22, 2019, or not, it’s a movie very much worth revisiting at least once a year. In fact, the upcoming fall season is the perfect time to watch all three of Jordan Peele’s horror features, the Us movie, Nope, and Get Out.

Please note there are spoilers ahead if you have not watched Us. Go stream the movie on Hulu before reading on.

Us came after the Oscar-winning horror Get Out, so you know fans crowded theaters to see it opening weekend. The movie became another hit film under Peele’s belt. But, just like Get Out, the Us movie came with many twists and theories. Needless to say, most of us ran to Google right after watching for answers.

Jordan Peele’s Us movie explained

The movie follows Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) and Gabe ( Winston Duke ), a married couple and parents to Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex). The four go on a family trip over the summer and frightening occurrences begin right away. Four people break into their home, but these aren’t regular individuals, these are their doppelgängers. The doppelgängers have been living underground for years and have now decided to surface and replace their hosts.

Final spoiler warning!

The big reveal at the end of the movie is that Adelaide is not the real Adelaide, it’s her doppelgänger. Adelaide was swapped when she was a little girl, the doppelgänger trapped her and took her place in the world. In the final chilling moments, Adelaide’s son is starring at her as if he knows his mom’s secret. Clues about Adelaide’s true identity were present throughout the movie from the very start.

What is the meaning behind Jordan Peele’s Us movie?

The Adelaide from the tunnels that took “the real” Adelaide’s place proves that, if given the opportunity, all of the doppelgängers can live happy and successful lives. Instead, they are forced to live underground while “the real” versions of them enjoy life.

This theme has been compared to the different classes in society, such as the rich and poor, and the white vs minorities.

Who created the tethered (doppelgängers)?

So where did the tethered (what the tunnel doppelgängers are known as) come from? They were a government experiment, but this part isn’t explained too well. But we do understand that the experiment was abandoned and the tethered were forgotten about.

Next. Talk To Me ending explained: What happens at the end of the horror movie?. dark

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I recently published a book about movies I hated, and people have been asking me which reviews are harder to write--those about great movies, or those about terrible ones. The answer is neither. The most unreviewable movies are those belonging to the spoof genre--movies like " Airplane! " and " The Naked Gun " and all the countless spin-offs and retreads of the same basic idea.

"Scary Movie" is a film in that tradition: A raucous, satirical attack on slasher movies, teenage horror movies and " The Matrix ." I saw the movie, I laughed, I took notes, and now I am at a loss to write the review. All of the usual critical categories and strategies collapse in the face of a film like this.

Shall I discuss the plot? There is none, really--only a flimsy clothesline to link some of the gags. The characters? They are all types or targets, not people. The dialogue? You can't review the dialogue in the original movies (like " I Know What You Did Last Summer ") because it is mindlessly functional, serving only to advance the plot. How can you discuss the satire, except to observe it is more mindless? (Some of the dialogue, indeed, seems lifted bodily from the earlier films and rotated slightly in the direction of satire.) Faced with a dilemma like this, the experienced critic falls back on a reliable ploy. He gives away some of the best jokes and punch lines. He's like a buddy who has just walked out of a movie and tells you the funny stuff before you walk in.

I am tempted. I fight the impulse to tell you that when a character is asked for the name of a favorite scary movie, the answer is " Kazaam ." That some of the scenes take place at B. A. Corpse High School. That the teenagers in the movie are played mostly by actors in their late 20s and 30s--and that the movie comments on this. That the movie's virgin has a certificate to prove it. That the invaluable Carmen Electra plays a character not coincidentally named Drew.

The movie takes a shotgun approach to horror and slasher movies, but if it has a single target, that would be Kevin Williamson , screenwriter of " Scream " and co-inventor of the self-aware slasher subgenre. There is a sense in which "Scary Movie" is doing the same sort of self-referential humor as "Scream," since it is not only directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans , co-written by Shawn and Marlon Wayans (among others), and starring several Wayanses, but makes fun of various Wayans trademarks, especially the obligatory homophobic jokes. (There's a scene involving a closeted jock who can make love to his girlfriend only when she's wearing football shoulderpads.) The movie also features the wild exaggeration of stereotypical African-American behavior, which is another Wayans specialty. Consider the scene where Regina Hall plays a black woman at " Shakespeare in Love ," who shouts "That ain't no man!" when Gwyneth Paltrow is on the screen, videotapes the movie from her seat and carries on a cell phone conversation. Funny, though; now that I've written about it, I realize this is not intended to be a satire of African-American behavior, but an attack on the behavior of countless moviegoers, and Wayans has simply used Regina Hall as an example of non-traditional casting. Or maybe not.

The bottom line in reviewing a movie like this is, does it work? Is it funny? Yes, it is. Not funny with the shocking impact of "Airplane!," which had the advantage of breaking new ground. But also not a tired wheeze like some of the lesser and later Leslie Nielsen films. To get your money's worth, you need to be familiar with the various teenage horror franchises, and if you are, "Scary Movie" delivers the goods.

Note: The original title of "Scary Movie" was "Scream If You Know What I Did Last Halloween." The original title of "Scream" was "Scary Movie." Still available: "I Still Know What You Did the Summer Before Last."

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Scary Movie (2000)

Rated R For Strong Crude Sexual Humor, Language, Drug Use and Violence

Keenen Ivory Wayans as Masked Killer

Carmen Electra as Drew

Cheri Oteri as Gail Hailstorm

Frank B. Moore as Not Drew's Boyfriend

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Directed by

Keenen Ivory Wayans
Shawn Wayans
Marlon Wayans
Buddy Johnson
Phil Beauman
Jason Friedberg
Aaron Seltzer

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Scary movie, common sense media reviewers.

This movie will only frighten you with its crudeness.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Just about everyone is the butt of a joke or two--

No role models here.

Many bloody stabbings. A girl is electrocuted. Cha

Countless references to oral sex. Graphic photogra

Frequent extreme profanity, with the majority of i

Product placement is prevalent.

Everyone from the sometimes drunk and stoned kille

Positive Messages

Just about everyone is the butt of a joke or two--including African Americans, the elderly, homosexuals, the mentally handicapped, and overweight people. One gag involves semen. Jokes about virgins, pubic hair, and sticking a penis in a vacuum cleaner.

Positive Role Models

Violence & scariness.

Many bloody stabbings. A girl is electrocuted. Characters are killed for laughs. One is beheaded. Another kills himself. The costumed killer chases his victims, although it's more silly than scary.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Countless references to oral sex. Graphic photographs of a penis, a pair of bloated testicles, and an erect penis in a gay character's ear. The characters all have sex, and we see lots of groping. A male gym teacher cross-dresses to have access to female students.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Frequent extreme profanity, with the majority of it sexually-themed.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Drinking, drugs & smoking.

Everyone from the sometimes drunk and stoned killer to Cindy's drug-dealing criminal father indulges. Drug use is prevalent.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that just about everyone is the butt of a joke or two -- including African Americans, the elderly, homosexuals, the mentally handicapped, and overweight people. Frequent extreme profanity, with the majority of it sexually-themed. Every character acts questionably, from the sometimes drunk and stoned killer to Cindy's drug-dealing criminal father. Drug use is prevalent. Countless references to oral sex. Graphic photographs of a penis, a pair of bloated testicles, and an erect penis in a gay character's ear. One gag involves semen. Jokes about virgins, pubic hair, and sticking a penis in a vacuum cleaner. The characters all have sex, and we see lots of groping. A male gym teacher cross-dresses to have access to female students. Many bloody stabbings. A girl is electrocuted. Characters are killed for laughs. One is beheaded. Another kills himself. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Kids say (136)

Based on 43 parent reviews

Objectifies and demeans - graphic nudity

What's the story.

SCARY MOVIE is a spoof of the Scream movies, which themselves lampoon traditional horror flicks. That would make Scary Movie a spoof of a spoof. The plot, such that it is, revolves around a bunch of stereotypical teens targeted by a crazy killer determined to dispatch the whole gang.

Is It Any Good?

The writers often go for the cheap laugh in this movie, frequently at the expense of minorities. And the scenes involving male organs and bodily fluids feel like reheated Farrelly brothers ( There's Something About Mary ) without the laughs. While Scary Movie 's thin plot mirrors scenes from Scream , the comparison ends there. All three Scream movies relied on witty dialogue and engaging characters, something that Scary Movie desperately lacks.

A costumed killer chases a flatulent, underwear-clad character and stabs her, piercing her breast implant. A grandmother is thrown down steps to impede a killer's progress. A retarded deputy soils his pants. Are you in hysterics yet? If not, Scary Movie will only frighten you with its crudeness. But not all the movie's humor is as juvenile as it might seem; some jokes -- like a scene in which a group of guys and the costumed killer re-create the famous "Whassup!" beer commercial -- evoke hearty laughter from the teen target audience. Such humor, however, has its limitations -- if you don't know the references that were made fun of, you won't find it funny.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about what's funny, and what's offensive and/or stupid. Why do different people find different things funny? Why do parents and kids often laugh at such different things?

Movie Details

In theaters : July 7, 2000
On DVD or streaming : October 13, 2001
Cast : Marlon Wayans , Shannon Elizabeth , Shawn Wayans
Director : Keenen Ivory Wayans
Inclusion Information : Black directors, Black actors, Female actors
Studio : Dimension
Genre : Horror
Run time : 88 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : strong crude sexual humor, language, drug use and violence
Last updated : April 21, 2024

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45 Scariest Horror Movies That Are Too Disturbing to Re-Watch

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Content Warning: The following article contains discussions of graphic violence, animal cruelty, sexual assault, and rape. Everybody loves a good scare, as the undying popularity of horror movies continues to prove. From unexpected jump scares and eerie atmosphere, to terrifying creatures and supernatural occurrences, a lot of fun can be had with the genre. However, these films aren’t always meant to be a pleasant experience, and there are some horror movies that are actually scary and truly disturbing and twisted that even the most seasoned enthusiast would struggle to sit through.

Whether it’s due to graphic violence, excessive gore, controversial subject matter, or unsettling imagery, these movies are hard to unsee. The scariest horror movies will definitely have viewers questioning the filmmaker's intentions and leave them with no desire to revisit them in the near future. These most disturbing horror movies in cinematic history are full of controversial plots and genuinely nightmare-inducing sequences, which often end up becoming hot topics of discussion among fans and critics alike. Feel good family fun, this certainly is not.

45 'The Killing of a Sacred Deer' (2017)

Directed by yorgos lanthimos.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos is known for his unique movies, like The Favourite and Poor Things , which usually feature an offbeat tone, quirky characters, and deadpan delivery. However, the director’s darkest film to date is the horror-thriller The Killing of a Sacred Deer , which still retains the director’s signature elements, but in a far more sinister manner. Colin Farrell plays Steven Murphy, a wealthy surgeon and family man who has a seemingly perfect life.

When Steven meets the strange and awkward teen Martin ( Barry Keoghan ), he takes him under his wing. Martin then infiltrates his family home, and violent and unsettling occurrences begin to take place. While The Killing of a Sacred Deer isn’t as graphic as some traditional horror movies, it has an eerie and uncomfortable tone that is hard to stomach , making for an uncomfortable viewing experience.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer

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44 'The Exorcist' (1973)

Directed by william friedkin.

Arguably the most iconic demonic possession horror movie , The Exorcist is a classic within the genre, and influenced a whole new generation of horror movies. The film follows Regan ( Linda Blair ), a young girl who becomes possessed by a demonic entity, and her mother, Chris ( Ellen Burstyn ), who enlists the help of two priests to save her.

At the time of release, The Exorcist was the scariest horror movie audiences had ever seen , with viewers even fainting. While some of the film’s scare factor has become outdated thanks to the evolution of filmmaking and effects, and almost seems tame compared to other movies, The Exorcist is still scarier than some horror movies released today. It is striking and unnerving, with visceral imagery that has become legendary in the horror pantheon.

The Exorcist

43 'barbarian' (2022), directed by zach cregger.

Barbarian is one of the most bonkers horror movies to hit screens in recent memory. On the surface, it seems like your standard creepy horror flick. A woman named Tara ( Georgina Campbell ) books an Airbnb, only to find it has been double-booked by a mysterious stranger named Keith ( Bill Skarsgård ). Just when you think you know where the narrative is going, Barbarian flips the script and goes to a totally unexpected and wild place .

The film’s second half is completely demented and gross, but it does not reach the disturbing level of some of the higher-ranked films on this list due to its unexpected humor and self-awareness. Barbarian is a totally wild and unpredictable ride that will have viewers questioning what it is they just witnessed.

42 'The Conjuring' (2013)

Directed by james wan.

James Wan is one of the most popular horror directors working in the industry today, responsible for hits like Saw and Insidious . However, it was his 2013 film The Conjuring that reinvigorated the horror genre for the first time in years, giving it new life. Based on true events (what everybody wants to hear at the start of a horror movie), the film follows paranormal investigators Ed ( Patrick Wilson ) and Lorraine Warren ( Vera Farmiga ), who help a family being terrorized by a supernatural presence.

Along with a genuinely intriguing story and fleshed-out characters, The Conjuring brought back old-school scares in a way that remains fresh and exciting. The film also introduced fans to the now infamous Annabelle doll , and its success would go on to launch a franchise.

The Conjuring

41 'the perfection' (2018), directed by richard shepard.

Netflix has released a slew of original horror films, but one that stands out (and is easily underrated) is The Perfection , starring Get Out and M3GAN ’s Allison Williams . Williams plays troubled music prodigy Charlotte, who returns to her prestigious music school to find that she has been replaced by new star pupil Lizzie ( Logan Browning ).

The pair are sent down a sinister path there is no returning from, embarking on the ultimate revenge plot. While viewers may initially make comparisons to a rivalry narrative like Black Swan , it turns out The Perfection is much more David Cronenberg's body horror style . The film takes big swings and risks, featuring some incredibly repulsive and striking imagery that will leave you squirming.

The Perfection

40 'funny games' (1997), directed by michael haneke.

Despite not technically being a horror movie, Michael Haneke ’s original Funny Games is one of the most terrifying non-horror films of all time , and is truly difficult to stomach. The psychological thriller follows two young men ( Arno Frisch and Frank Giering ) who hold a family hostage in their lakeside vacation home. They abuse and force them to play sadistic games for their own sick entertainment.

The psychotic Paul (Firsch) and Peter (Giering) often break the fourth wall throughout the film, directly addressing the audience. The pair tease the viewers, asking them moral questions and therefore making them feel complicit by simply watching the torture play out on screen. It’s an effective narrative technique that makes the whole viewing experience much harder to digest. By the end of Funny Games , audiences will be asking themselves what exactly they got out of watching something so horrid.

Funny Games (1997)

39 'deliver us from evil' (2014), directed by scott derrickson.

While there are definitely better exorcism films out there than Scott Derrickson ’s Deliver Us from Evil , there is no denying that it leaves you feeling unsettled and frightened. Eric Bana plays Ralph, a police officer who teams up with Mendoza ( Édgar Ramírez ), a priest, to combat possessions that are wreaking havoc on New York City.

From gruesome corpses to otherworldly demons, Deliver Us from Evil features some truly grotesque and scarring imagery that leaves an impact . Its religious themes are also extremely dark and disturbing, but thanks to its cop drama element and moments of levity, it is not the scariest movie on this list. However, the film is still a gnarly and bleak horror outing that is not for the faint of heart.

Deliver Us from Evil

38 '[rec]' (2007), directed by paco plaza and jaume balagueró.

The use of found-footage filmmaking is extremely popular within the horror genre, thanks to the success of films like The Blair Witch Project . One of the most effective and frightening uses of the stylistic technique can be seen in the Spanish horror film [Rec] . Entirely using found footage, it depicts a television reporter ( Manuela Velasco ) and her cameraman ( Pablo Rosso ), who follow emergency workers into a dark apartment building.

There is a virus outbreak, trapping everybody inside and slowly turning people into vicious cannibals. The found-footage presentation makes [Rec] feel terrifyingly authentic and intimate, fully immersing the viewer in a very realistic manner. The gruesome effects, convincing acting, and production elements make it feel as if you are watching a real TV report, and the film’s bleak ending will leave viewers feeling extremely unsettled.

Rent on Amazon

37 'Host' (2020)

Directed by rob savage.

We have all become far too familiar with Zoom and communicating remotely through work meetings and social catch-ups during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, director Rob Savage capitalized on the popularity of the application (and social circumstances) to make Host , a film that proves you don’t need a big budget to make something terrifying .

Filmed entirely through webcams and set on a computer screen, a group of friends perform an online seance and accidentally invite a demonic presence into their homes. Savage uses simple tricks to conjure up genuinely nasty scares during a heart-pounding runtime of just under an hour. Host is a brilliant technical experiment, and Zoom meetings will never be the same again.

36 'The Descent' (2005)

Directed by neil marshall.

One of the most terrifying and claustrophobic movies ever made , The Descent is a lean and nasty horror experience . The film follows a group of friends on a cave expedition, where they become trapped inside and are hunted by bloodthirsty creatures. The film is a back-to-basics horror thriller, utilizing the isolation and limited space of its setting for some truly horrific and visceral sequences.

It starts with a slow-burn build and then releases full carnage for its remaining runtime. The suffocating atmosphere of the caves and the situation makes this film so uncomfortable and scary to watch, as it plays on people’s real-life fears of closed and small spaces. The Descent ’s ending is also incredibly grim, leaving viewers with a sense of hopelessness as the credits roll.

The Descent

Watch on Amazon Prime

35 'Veronica' (2017)

Directed by paco plaza.

Commonly referred to as one of the scariest movies on Netflix , Veronica is full of well-executed scares and demonic imagery that will haunt audiences. During a solar eclipse, a teenage girl ( Sandra Escacena ) uses an Ouija board with her friends to summon her father. Afterward, she becomes plagued by evil forces.

Veronica features all the unease and spookiness of any possession film , but what really makes it so memorable and frightening is the fact that it is loosely based on a true story. It takes inspiration from the Vallecas case, where a young girl similarly used the board to contact a loved one, and died soon after. The movie has a sense of realism that makes it incredibly creepy and difficult to sit through.

Verónica (2017)

Madrid, 1991. A teen girl finds herself besieged by an evil supernatural force after she played Ouija with two classmates.

Watch on Netflix

34 'The Hills Have Eyes' (2006)

Directed by alexandre aja.

While the 1977 version of The Hills Have Eyes is definitely a horror classic, its 2006 remake is certainly more effective and brutal, and might even be a better version. The film follows a family traveling to California to celebrate an anniversary, but things turn nightmarish when they are captured by mutated cannibals.

The Hills Have Eyes features extreme gore and repulsive elements like animal cruelty and sexual assault , with certain scenes that are particularly hard to stomach. It will make your skin crawl and have you most likely avoiding any kind of road trips in the near future. The mutant cannibals, and the acts they commit, are absolutely horrific. While it’s a well-made horror film that certainly leaves a mark, it is equally traumatizing.

Rent on Apple TV

33 'Sinister' (2012)

Considered by many to be the scariest modern horror film of all time, Sinister is… well, pretty darn sinister. Ethan Hawke plays Ellison Oswald, a true crime non-fiction crime writer who moves his family into a house where gruesome murders took place. Desperate for inspiration for his work, he delves into who may have been responsible for those murders, but his research reveals horrifying discoveries.

The film has a simple plot but is executed in a way that will be lodged in your subconscious for a long time. The Super-8 tapes Hawke’s character stumbles upon featuring various murders are already uneasy to watch , but it’s the demonic face that keeps popping up in each of them that is the stuff of nightmares. Its terrible twist has also become well-known among horror fans, who likely wish they could watch it all again for the first time.

32 'Hereditary' (2018)

Directed by ari aster.

Director Ari Aster has cemented himself as a profound and fresh new voice in horror over the last few years, as exhibited with his debut Hereditary . The film follows a grief-stricken family after the death of their matriarch, as they discover sinister ancestral secrets through supernatural disturbances.

The scariest movie ever from A24's collection, Aster’s film is bleak and utterly hopeless, littered with unnatural and explicit imagery among its unnerving ambiance. Toni Collette ’s performance is incredibly chilling , and one particular scene involving a nut allergy takes an abhorrent turn that viewers will not soon forget. That one scene has likely shocked and terrified viewers into never seeing the film again. Dark, dark stuff.

31 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' (1974)

Directed by tobe hooper.

Many argue that modern horror films are always scarier, but that’s not the case when it comes to 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre . The film sees Leatherface and his cannibal family hunt down a group of unsuspecting hitchhikers for the first time, with mean and bloody results.

Thanks to its balance of sheer dread and extreme gore, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was banned in several countries when first released, and is still considered one of the scariest movies of all time to this day . Disgusting and remarkably impressive for its time, it is certainly not for the faint of heart. Although later entries in the Texas Chain Saw Massacre haven't managed to reach the impressive heights of the first, there's still something to be said for the way the 1974 film established an enduring franchise beloved among horror fans.

Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Watch on Peacock

30 'Goodnight Mommy' (2014)

Directed by veronika franz and severin fiala.

Goodnight Mommy is a slow-burn psychological horror film that is drenched in dread from start to finish. It follows twin brothers Elias ( Elias Schwarz ) and Lukas ( Lukas Schwarz ), who begin to suspect the identity of their mother ( Susanne Wuest ) when she comes home covered in bandages after facial reconstructive surgery.

Always cited among the scary horror movies, Goodnight Mommy gets under your skin with its creepy atmosphere and delicate pace but will have viewers squirming during its icky and excessive torture scenes, where the torture is being carried out by children. It goes to extremely dark and shocking places and knows how to use its twisted mother-child relationship to its full advantage, subverting expectations of what such a connection should look like.

Watch on Tubi

29 'The Innocents' (2021)

Directed by eskil vogt.

If you’ve seen any of their films, you’d know the Nordic always nail atmospheric horror and use it to create really scary movies. Pair that with creepy kids carrying out sadistic acts, and you’ve got yourself some pretty uncomfortable viewing. The Innocents takes these elements to create an understated yet relentlessly haunting film.

During a bright Nordic summer, a group of kids experiment with their newfound powers as things take a dark turn. The violence and cruelty on display (including towards animals) in The Innocents are made all the more difficult to stomach because it is being carried out by children. The characters who are supposed to be innocent due to their age commit unspeakable acts without remorse, with each one worse than the last. Viewer discretion is advised.

Watch on Shudder

28 'Terrifier 2' (2022)

Directed by damien leone.

The Terrifier movies are some of the most controversial in the horror genre, and sequel Terrifier 2 outdoes its predecessor in every way possible. This time round, Art the Clown ( David Howard Thornton ) is resurrected by an evil entity, and returns to the town of Miles County to terrorize Sienna ( Lauren LaVera ) and her brother Jonathan ( Elliot Fullman ).

Almost an hour longer than the original film, Terrifier 2 goes all out in the gore and shock department . Audiences reportedly vomited and fainted while watching the film, which includes detailed and nausea-inducing kills and torture from Terrfier 's main villain . While it is undoubtedly difficult to watch, hardcore fans of the slasher genre responded positively to the film, as it received rave reviews and performed surprisingly well at the box office.

Terrifier 2

27 'tusk' (2014), directed by kevin smith.

When one thinks of most Kevin Smith movies , buddy comedies and low-budget cult classics usually come to mind. However, what doesn’t come to mind is twisted body horror, which is exactly what Smith goes for in 2014’s Tusk . Justin Long plays an arrogant podcaster who travels to Canada to interview a famous recluse ( Michael Parks ) who has a strange obsession with walruses.

The next day, Wallace (Long) wakes up to discover that Howe (Parks) plans to surgically transform him into a walrus. While retaining certain comedic elements that the director is known for (you’d have to with such an absurd plot), Smith truly pushes the boundaries of visual imagery in a grotesque and unnatural way . The practical effects used to turn Long into a human walrus are realistically disgusting, and will likely leave a lasting effect.

26 'Mother!' (2017)

Directed by darren aronofsky.

One of the most polarizing movies of all time , director Darren Aronofsky 's Mother! stars Jennifer Lawrence as the titular protagonist, who lives with Him ( Javier Bardem ) in a Victorian mansion in the countryside. When unexpected guests arrive one after the other, chaos ensues as Mother is caught in a confusing and terrifying turn of events.

Unsettling from start to finish, the film relies heavily on allegory, extreme sound design, and shaky camera work to convey its metaphorical story. This same metaphorical approach is what has made it so divisive among fans and critics alike, who can't agree about whether it's a brilliant masterpiece or a jumbled mess of a film. It escalates in an unexpected and genuinely frightening way and reaches an explosive conclusion that will leave viewers perturbed and never wanting to revisit Mother! again .

Mother! (2017)

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The Best Horror Films on Prime Video to Watch Right Now

Why not spend the long weekend with a scary flick?

Prime Video has a lot to offer horror fans, from Ti West's Pearl to M. Night Shyamalan's Knock at the Cabin. Ads are now a part of the streaming service , but if you'd prefer to watch your spooky content without commercial interruptions, you can pay an additional fee to remove them.

Here are some highly rated horror flicks to satisfy your cravings. Dim the lights, grab the popcorn and enjoy your creepy feature.

Psycho (1960)

Prime Video currently offers Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which is a pretty big deal -- the black-and-white flick frequently cracks the top five on lists of the best horror films ever. If you've never seen the film, starring Janet Leigh as Marion Crane, it's best to go straight in without looking up details.

Pearl (2022)

A prequel to Ti West's film X, Pearl stars Mia Goth as a younger version of the elderly villain in that flick. MaXXXine -- another addition to the series set after X and also starring Goth as the title character -- is scheduled to hit theaters this summer, on July 5.

Knock at the Cabin (2023)

M. Night Shyamalan's Knock at the Cabin is based on the novel The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul G. Tremblay. A family is vacationing at a remote cabin when a band of strangers shows up with an impossible demand: The three cabin-dwellers must choose to save humanity or their family.

Nanny (2022)

Nanny is an increasingly unnerving movie about a mother working in the US and separated from her son in Senegal, whom she hopes will soon join her. The powerful, chilling film -- led by a captivating Anna Diop -- takes viewers through her difficult, haunting wait.

Totally Killer (2023)

Want to revisit the '80s? Kiernan Shipka time-travels to the decade and takes on a killer in this new Prime Video slasher comedy. Randall Park and Julie Bowen also make appearances.

Smile (2022)

An unnatural grin can be utterly terrifying. This recent release takes full advantage of that. Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon, actor and daughter of Kevin Bacon) goes on a horrific journey after she witnesses a traumatic incident involving a patient.

The Descent (2005)

In this British horror film from 2005, six young women go spelunking and rub up against terrifying humanoid cave dwellers. It's a race to evade the dark before becoming creature food. If you need another reason to descend, the flick's high user score on Metacritic suggests you'll be glad you went on this chilling expedition.

Candyman (2021)

Jordan Peele and Nia DaCosta are at the helm of this gripping slasher. A sequel to the 1992 film of the same name, Candyman tackles issues such as gentrification and police brutality. Prepare for blood, swarming bees and people making the unfortunate decision to recite Candyman's name in front of a mirror. Candyman is available to watch for free with ads using Amazon Freevee.

Suspiria (2018)

If you like your horror films interspersed with a bit of contemporary dance (and who wouldn't!) then Suspiria is definitely the one for you. It tells the story of a supernatural dance academy run by a coven of witches and features themes like motherhood, guilt and abuse of power. An homage to the original 1977 film, Suspiria stars Dakota Johnson and Tilda Swinton.

Coherence (2014)

Coherence is a huge favorite here at CNET and it's a terrifying watch. Not necessarily in the traditional, gory, horrific sense but more in terms of the concepts. It's a multiverse movie released before multiverses were cool and it's not what you expect. Coherence is the kind of movie you'll finish and immediately rewatch to try and rewire your brain. It's a fantastic achievement. A must watch.

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Horror-Comedies: 25 Scary Movies That Make You Laugh

Posted: May 28, 2024 | Last updated: May 28, 2024

<p>"Zombeavers" is a comedic horror film that centers around a group of young people facing off against bloodthirsty zombie beavers. The absurd premise and the use of animatronic puppets to portray the zombified beavers add a touch of ridiculousness.</p> <p>The cheesy dialogues and exaggerated situations further contribute to its comedic charm. Although clearly not aiming to frighten, the film released in 2014 becomes such a hilariously bad experience that it's good, attracting viewers with its unique blend of horror and comedy.</p>

Zombeavers (2014)

"Zombeavers" is a comedic horror film that centers around a group of young people facing off against bloodthirsty zombie beavers. The absurd premise and the use of animatronic puppets to portray the zombified beavers add a touch of ridiculousness.

The cheesy dialogues and exaggerated situations further contribute to its comedic charm. Although clearly not aiming to frighten, the film released in 2014 becomes such a hilariously bad experience that it's good, attracting viewers with its unique blend of horror and comedy.

<p>"Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey" is a twisted parody of the classic children's character that has puzzled many with its unusual blend of horror and nostalgia. The movie follows Pooh and his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood as they encounter a series of bloody and disturbing events.</p> <p>What makes this film hilariously bad is its absurd attempt to transform innocent characters into figures of terror, resulting in situations that are awkward and out of place. The cheap special effects and exaggerated performances further contribute to its unintentionally comedic charm.</p> <p>Ultimately, this new title of Winnie-the-Pooh is a unique cinematic experience that boldly mocks childhood innocence while trying to be terrifying in a completely implausible way.</p>

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023)

"Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey" is a twisted parody of the classic children's character that has puzzled many with its unusual blend of horror and nostalgia. The movie follows Pooh and his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood as they encounter a series of bloody and disturbing events.

What makes this film hilariously bad is its absurd attempt to transform innocent characters into figures of terror, resulting in situations that are awkward and out of place. The cheap special effects and exaggerated performances further contribute to its unintentionally comedic charm.

Ultimately, this new title of Winnie-the-Pooh is a unique cinematic experience that boldly mocks childhood innocence while trying to be terrifying in a completely implausible way.

<p>"Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus" is a sea monster film, directed by Jack Perez, that defies all logic and credibility. The plot follows a mega shark and a giant octopus emerging from the ocean depths to engage in an epic battle.</p> <p>The low-quality special effects and exaggerated performances by the actors make this movie a feast for lovers of B-movie productions.</p> <p>Absurd scenes, like the mega shark jumping out of the water to bite a flying airplane, are so ridiculous that they become comedic. The film is a perfect example of a movie that embraces its own absurdity to create an unforgettable, hilariously bad yet entertaining cinematic experience.</p>

Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009)

"Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus" is a sea monster film, directed by Jack Perez, that defies all logic and credibility. The plot follows a mega shark and a giant octopus emerging from the ocean depths to engage in an epic battle.

The low-quality special effects and exaggerated performances by the actors make this movie a feast for lovers of B-movie productions.

Absurd scenes, like the mega shark jumping out of the water to bite a flying airplane, are so ridiculous that they become comedic. The film is a perfect example of a movie that embraces its own absurdity to create an unforgettable, hilariously bad yet entertaining cinematic experience.

<p>Although "Leprechaun" featured Jennifer Aniston as one of its protagonists, the 1993 film is quite bizarre. It takes the concept of horror to a new level by presenting a vengeful leprechaun who pursues a group of people in search of his stolen gold.</p> <p>Seeing the Leprechaun played by Warwick Davis wreak havoc with clever rhymes and elaborate traps is a comedic and unforgettable experience. Although clearly not intended to scare, it has become a cult film due to its extravagant nature and the laughter it provokes with its lighthearted approach to horror.</p>

Leprechaun (1993)

Although "Leprechaun" featured Jennifer Aniston as one of its protagonists, the 1993 film is quite bizarre. It takes the concept of horror to a new level by presenting a vengeful leprechaun who pursues a group of people in search of his stolen gold.

Seeing the Leprechaun played by Warwick Davis wreak havoc with clever rhymes and elaborate traps is a comedic and unforgettable experience. Although clearly not intended to scare, it has become a cult film due to its extravagant nature and the laughter it provokes with its lighthearted approach to horror.

<p>"Manos: The Hands of Fate" is famous for being one of the most inept and perplexing films ever made. The plot follows a family that gets lost in the desert and ends up at a house inhabited by a cult that worships hands.</p> <p>The movie is known for its evident technical errors, such as out-of-focus scenes and careless editing. The performances are extremely poor, with confusing dialogues and exaggerated gestures that are more comedic than frightening.</p> <p>Moreover, Manos has such an absurd and bewildering plot that defies any rational explanation. This combination of technical and narrative flaws makes it a hilariously bad and tasteless experience.</p>

Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

"Manos: The Hands of Fate" is famous for being one of the most inept and perplexing films ever made. The plot follows a family that gets lost in the desert and ends up at a house inhabited by a cult that worships hands.

The movie is known for its evident technical errors, such as out-of-focus scenes and careless editing. The performances are extremely poor, with confusing dialogues and exaggerated gestures that are more comedic than frightening.

Moreover, Manos has such an absurd and bewildering plot that defies any rational explanation. This combination of technical and narrative flaws makes it a hilariously bad and tasteless experience.

<p>"ThanksKilling" is a B-movie horror film that plays with clichés and stereotypes from slasher movies. The plot follows a demonic turkey that rises from the grave on Thanksgiving Day to sow chaos and death.</p> <p>With exaggerated performances and absurd dialogues, the film shamelessly mocks itself and the genre's tropes. The low-budget special effects and ridiculous situations make it a hilariously bad experience for those who enjoy B-movie horror</p>

ThanksKilling (2009)

"ThanksKilling" is a B-movie horror film that plays with clichés and stereotypes from slasher movies. The plot follows a demonic turkey that rises from the grave on Thanksgiving Day to sow chaos and death.

With exaggerated performances and absurd dialogues, the film shamelessly mocks itself and the genre's tropes. The low-budget special effects and ridiculous situations make it a hilariously bad experience for those who enjoy B-movie horror

<p>"The Room", directed, written and starring Tommy Wiseau, is known for its bewildering blend of unintentional drama and comedy. The plot follows Johnny, a man whose life unravels due to betrayals by his fiancée Lisa and best friend Mark.</p> <p>What makes the movie hilariously bad are its absurd dialogues and bizarre plot choices, including random scenes and characters who appear without reason. The performances are awkward and emotionally exaggerated, while the interactions between characters completely lack credibility.</p> <p>Despite its flaws, it has become a cult phenomenon, with public screenings where audiences enjoy its errors ironically, and it has managed to make the list of films so bad they'll make you laugh.</p>

The Room (2003)

"The Room", directed, written and starring Tommy Wiseau, is known for its bewildering blend of unintentional drama and comedy. The plot follows Johnny, a man whose life unravels due to betrayals by his fiancée Lisa and best friend Mark.

What makes the movie hilariously bad are its absurd dialogues and bizarre plot choices, including random scenes and characters who appear without reason. The performances are awkward and emotionally exaggerated, while the interactions between characters completely lack credibility.

Despite its flaws, it has become a cult phenomenon, with public screenings where audiences enjoy its errors ironically, and it has managed to make the list of films so bad they'll make you laugh.

<p>"Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead" is a horror comedy that parodies zombie films. The plot follows a fast-food restaurant built on an old Indian cemetery, where zombified birds wreak havoc.</p> <p>The exaggerated performances and grotesque scenes of chicken-related violence are so extreme that they become comedic. The film revels in its own excess and lack of seriousness, making it a unique experience for fans of B-movies and absurd horror comedies.</p>

Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006)

"Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead" is a horror comedy that parodies zombie films. The plot follows a fast-food restaurant built on an old Indian cemetery, where zombified birds wreak havoc.

The exaggerated performances and grotesque scenes of chicken-related violence are so extreme that they become comedic. The film revels in its own excess and lack of seriousness, making it a unique experience for fans of B-movies and absurd horror comedies.

<p>"Ice Cream Man" from 1995 is a horror film centered around a disturbed ice cream man who uses his ice cream truck to commit murders. The bizarre premise and exaggerated scenes make this movie hilariously bad.</p> <p>The over-the-top performances, especially by lead actor Clint Howard as the disturbed ice cream man, add a comedic touch to the narrative.</p> <p>The combination of dark humor and B-movie horror makes it a unique cinematic experience that appeals to genre fans for its unabashed charm and lack of pretense.</p>

Ice Cream Man (1995)

"Ice Cream Man" from 1995 is a horror film centered around a disturbed ice cream man who uses his ice cream truck to commit murders. The bizarre premise and exaggerated scenes make this movie hilariously bad.

The over-the-top performances, especially by lead actor Clint Howard as the disturbed ice cream man, add a comedic touch to the narrative.

The combination of dark humor and B-movie horror makes it a unique cinematic experience that appeals to genre fans for its unabashed charm and lack of pretense.

<p>"Plan 9 from Outer Space" is an iconic film for being considered one of the worst of all time. Directed by Ed Wood, this science fiction and horror production presents an implausible plot about aliens attempting to resurrect the Earth's dead to stop a nuclear holocaust.</p> <p>The movie is plagued by numerous technical errors and limitations, from visible strings holding up the flying saucers to obvious shifts between day and night scenes. The performances are exaggerated and unconvincing, with ridiculous dialogues that defy any logic.</p> <p>The horror title has gained a cult status precisely because of how terribly amusing it is, being a classic example of how not to make a movie.</p>

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

"Plan 9 from Outer Space" is an iconic film for being considered one of the worst of all time. Directed by Ed Wood, this science fiction and horror production presents an implausible plot about aliens attempting to resurrect the Earth's dead to stop a nuclear holocaust.

The movie is plagued by numerous technical errors and limitations, from visible strings holding up the flying saucers to obvious shifts between day and night scenes. The performances are exaggerated and unconvincing, with ridiculous dialogues that defy any logic.

The horror title has gained a cult status precisely because of how terribly amusing it is, being a classic example of how not to make a movie.

<p>"Frankenho*ker" is a horror comedy that follows an obsessed scientist attempting to bring back his dead girlfriend using parts from prostitutes, starring Patty Mullen as Elizabeth in the lead role.</p> <p>The ludicrous premise and grotesque scenes make this movie hilariously bad. The exaggerated performances and absurd dialogues add an extra comedic touch to the narrative.</p> <p>The film is a unique blend of dark humor and trashy horror, offering extravagant and ridiculous moments that delight viewers with its audacity and lack of seriousness.</p>

Frankenho*ker (1990)

"Frankenho*ker" is a horror comedy that follows an obsessed scientist attempting to bring back his dead girlfriend using parts from prostitutes, starring Patty Mullen as Elizabeth in the lead role.

The ludicrous premise and grotesque scenes make this movie hilariously bad. The exaggerated performances and absurd dialogues add an extra comedic touch to the narrative.

The film is a unique blend of dark humor and trashy horror, offering extravagant and ridiculous moments that delight viewers with its audacity and lack of seriousness.

<p>When we thought we had seen it all, in 1978 comes "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes", a cult film that mocks the horror genre with its ridiculous premise of killer tomatoes attacking humanity.</p> <p>Filled with absurd humor, it features comically exaggerated scenes of people fleeing from rolling tomatoes and jumping over them. What makes it hilariously bad are its rudimentary special effects and exaggerated performances, along with a deliberately ridiculous script.</p> <p>Although clearly intended as a parody, the film has captured the attention of movie fans for its audacity and its ability to make viewers laugh at the expense of the horror genre.</p>

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978)

When we thought we had seen it all, in 1978 comes "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes", a cult film that mocks the horror genre with its ridiculous premise of killer tomatoes attacking humanity.

Filled with absurd humor, it features comically exaggerated scenes of people fleeing from rolling tomatoes and jumping over them. What makes it hilariously bad are its rudimentary special effects and exaggerated performances, along with a deliberately ridiculous script.

Although clearly intended as a parody, the film has captured the attention of movie fans for its audacity and its ability to make viewers laugh at the expense of the horror genre.

<p>"Santa's Slay" is a 2005 horror comedy that subverts the traditional figure of Santa Claus by portraying him as a sadistic villain who terrorizes a town, starring Bill Goldberg in the lead role.</p> <p>The absurd premise, combined with dark humor and over-the-top death scenes, makes this movie a cult gem for fans of absurd horror cinema. The exaggerated performances and ridiculous situations, such as Santa Claus using a sleigh pulled by reindeer as a vehicle of destruction, add to its comedic charm.</p> <p>Undoubtedly, it's a film that revels in breaking all rules and expectations, offering a visual feast of holiday horror that will make you laugh with its audacity and lack of seriousness.</p>

Santa's Slay (2005)

"Santa's Slay" is a 2005 horror comedy that subverts the traditional figure of Santa Claus by portraying him as a sadistic villain who terrorizes a town, starring Bill Goldberg in the lead role.

The absurd premise, combined with dark humor and over-the-top death scenes, makes this movie a cult gem for fans of absurd horror cinema. The exaggerated performances and ridiculous situations, such as Santa Claus using a sleigh pulled by reindeer as a vehicle of destruction, add to its comedic charm.

Undoubtedly, it's a film that revels in breaking all rules and expectations, offering a visual feast of holiday horror that will make you laugh with its audacity and lack of seriousness.

<p>"Sleepaway Camp" is known for being an unusual horror film that has gained notoriety for its strange performances and its unexpected twist ending. The plot follows Angela, a shy young girl who attends a summer camp where a series of murders begin to occur.</p> <p>What makes it so comically bad is its clumsy dialogue and the unnatural performances of the actors, especially the camp's children. Additionally, the film stands out for its cheap special effects and shocking moments that end up being more laughable than frightening.</p> <p>However, it is the surprising and disturbing ending that truly leaves viewers perplexed and wondering what they just witnessed, earning it a spot on the list of 25 horror titles that are truly bad.</p>

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

"Sleepaway Camp" is known for being an unusual horror film that has gained notoriety for its strange performances and its unexpected twist ending. The plot follows Angela, a shy young girl who attends a summer camp where a series of murders begin to occur.

What makes it so comically bad is its clumsy dialogue and the unnatural performances of the actors, especially the camp's children. Additionally, the film stands out for its cheap special effects and shocking moments that end up being more laughable than frightening.

However, it is the surprising and disturbing ending that truly leaves viewers perplexed and wondering what they just witnessed, earning it a spot on the list of 25 horror titles that are truly bad.

Sharknado (2013)

If we're talking about classic horror films that inevitably make you laugh, "Sharknado" (2013) undoubtedly makes the list, famous for its absurd premise of tornadoes lifting sharks from the ocean and hurling them onto Los Angeles.

The movie is a feast of ridiculous scenes where people battle flying sharks with chainsaws and other improvised weapons. What makes it such a hilariously bad experience is its complete lack of common sense and disregard for the laws of physics.

The exaggerated performances and low-budget special effects sequences only add more fun to this rollercoaster of absurdity. Although clearly not aiming for seriousness, it has managed to become a pop culture phenomenon thanks to its shamelessly ridiculous nature.

<p>"Killer Klowns from Outer Space" is a cult film that blends horror and comedy in a delightfully creative way. The plot follows extraterrestrials disguised as clowns who land on Earth to sow chaos and capture humans.</p> <p>It stands out for its colorful and extravagant special effects, as well as its terrifying clown antics that are more likely to induce laughter. The exaggerated performances and hilarious dialogues add an extra comedic touch.</p> <p>Undoubtedly, it's a visual feast of cinematic madness that is best enjoyed with a lighthearted sense of humor.</p>

Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)

"Killer Klowns from Outer Space" is a cult film that blends horror and comedy in a delightfully creative way. The plot follows extraterrestrials disguised as clowns who land on Earth to sow chaos and capture humans.

It stands out for its colorful and extravagant special effects, as well as its terrifying clown antics that are more likely to induce laughter. The exaggerated performances and hilarious dialogues add an extra comedic touch.

Undoubtedly, it's a visual feast of cinematic madness that is best enjoyed with a lighthearted sense of humor.

<p>Although "Mars Attacks!" is not strictly a horror film, it presents itself as a science fiction comedy with alien invasion elements. The title directed by Tim Burton does not take itself seriously and deliberately embraces ridicule and absurdity.</p> <p>The movie uses special effects and animation that, while not technically impressive, fit the campy and kitschy style that seeks to evoke nostalgia for science fiction films from the 1950s. Despite featuring a notable cast, its critical reception was mixed due to its peculiar approach and ironic tone.</p>

Mars Attacks! (1996)

Although "Mars Attacks!" is not strictly a horror film, it presents itself as a science fiction comedy with alien invasion elements. The title directed by Tim Burton does not take itself seriously and deliberately embraces ridicule and absurdity.

The movie uses special effects and animation that, while not technically impressive, fit the campy and kitschy style that seeks to evoke nostalgia for science fiction films from the 1950s. Despite featuring a notable cast, its critical reception was mixed due to its peculiar approach and ironic tone.

<p>"Birdemic: Shock and Terror" is considered a gem of bad cinema. The movie follows the story of a group of people who must fight for their lives when a horde of killer birds begins to attack without apparent reason.</p> <p>What makes the 2010 film so comically bad are its shoddy special effects: the birds, animated in a rudimentary manner, fly and attack with clumsy and unrealistic movements.</p> <p>The shrill sounds of the birds and the low-quality CGI explosions add an additional layer of hilarity. Furthermore, the performances are stiff and unnatural, contributing to the feeling that the movie is more of an unintentional parody than a genuine horror film.</p>

Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010)

"Birdemic: Shock and Terror" is considered a gem of bad cinema. The movie follows the story of a group of people who must fight for their lives when a horde of killer birds begins to attack without apparent reason.

What makes the 2010 film so comically bad are its shoddy special effects: the birds, animated in a rudimentary manner, fly and attack with clumsy and unrealistic movements.

The shrill sounds of the birds and the low-quality CGI explosions add an additional layer of hilarity. Furthermore, the performances are stiff and unnatural, contributing to the feeling that the movie is more of an unintentional parody than a genuine horror film.

<p>"Basket Case" is a cult film that follows the story of a young man who carries his deformed, Siamese twin brother in a basket while seeking revenge. The plot, although bizarre, becomes unintentional comedy due to exaggerated performances and unconvincing special effects.</p> <p>Directed and written by Frank Henenlotter, the film, which premiered in 1982 and earned an R rating, revels in its own extravagance and absurdity, making it an entertaining experience for fans of the most eccentric horror cinema.</p>

Basket Case (1982)

"Basket Case" is a cult film that follows the story of a young man who carries his deformed, Siamese twin brother in a basket while seeking revenge. The plot, although bizarre, becomes unintentional comedy due to exaggerated performances and unconvincing special effects.

Directed and written by Frank Henenlotter, the film, which premiered in 1982 and earned an R rating, revels in its own extravagance and absurdity, making it an entertaining experience for fans of the most eccentric horror cinema.

<p>"Rubber" is a unique film that mocks the conventions of horror cinema by presenting the story of a killer tire with telekinetic powers. The ridiculous and absurd premise, combined with a deliberately meta approach, makes it a hilariously bad experience.</p> <p>The movie mocks itself and the audience's expectations, even including a fictional audience within the plot that observes the chaos from a distance. The extravagant dialogues and surreal situations add to its comedic charm, making it a peculiar work that defies genre conventions.</p>

Rubber (2010)

"Rubber" is a unique film that mocks the conventions of horror cinema by presenting the story of a killer tire with telekinetic powers. The ridiculous and absurd premise, combined with a deliberately meta approach, makes it a hilariously bad experience.

The movie mocks itself and the audience's expectations, even including a fictional audience within the plot that observes the chaos from a distance. The extravagant dialogues and surreal situations add to its comedic charm, making it a peculiar work that defies genre conventions.

<p>Despite being marketed as a horror movie, "Troll 2" has been received more as an unintentional comedy due to its numerous technical and narrative flaws. The film's inability to scare viewers has generated a cult following among fans of B-movies.</p> <p>The title is known for its extremely poor performances and absurd dialogue that comes across as more comedic than terrifying. The actors deliver lines in an unnatural manner, which contributes to its reputation as a comedic cult film.</p>

Troll 2 (1990)

Despite being marketed as a horror movie, "Troll 2" has been received more as an unintentional comedy due to its numerous technical and narrative flaws. The film's inability to scare viewers has generated a cult following among fans of B-movies.

The title is known for its extremely poor performances and absurd dialogue that comes across as more comedic than terrifying. The actors deliver lines in an unnatural manner, which contributes to its reputation as a comedic cult film.

<p>"Chopping Mall" was released in 1986 and classified as a B-movie horror film, following a group of young people trapped in an automated shopping mall and pursued by killer security robots.</p> <p>The absurd premise and deliberately ridiculous execution turn this movie into a cult classic of B-movie cinema. The simple special effects and exaggerated performances add to the comedic charm, which is aware of its own absurd nature.</p>

Chopping Mall (1986)

"Chopping Mall" was released in 1986 and classified as a B-movie horror film, following a group of young people trapped in an automated shopping mall and pursued by killer security robots.

The absurd premise and deliberately ridiculous execution turn this movie into a cult classic of B-movie cinema. The simple special effects and exaggerated performances add to the comedic charm, which is aware of its own absurd nature.

<p>"Jack Frost" with Michael Keaton and Kelly Preston, presents a unique premise: a serial killer who transforms into an animated snowman after a chemical accident. The combination of absurd elements, like a murderous snowman with clever wordplay, makes this movie as mischievous as it is entertaining.</p> <p>The low-budget special effects and exaggerated performances add to the comedic charm of the film, which doesn't take itself seriously at all. It's a ridiculous and enjoyable cinematic experience that delights viewers with its bizarre concept and bold approach to horror.</p>

Jack Frost (1997)

"Jack Frost" with Michael Keaton and Kelly Preston, presents a unique premise: a serial killer who transforms into an animated snowman after a chemical accident. The combination of absurd elements, like a murderous snowman with clever wordplay, makes this movie as mischievous as it is entertaining.

The low-budget special effects and exaggerated performances add to the comedic charm of the film, which doesn't take itself seriously at all. It's a ridiculous and enjoyable cinematic experience that delights viewers with its bizarre concept and bold approach to horror.

<p>"The Toxic Avenger", an iconic film from '84, is a cult classic that follows the transformation of a weak young man into a mutant superhero after falling into a toxic waste barrel. The absurd plot and exaggerated scenes of violence make this movie as mischievous as it is entertaining.</p> <p>The rudimentary special effects and deliberately exaggerated performances add a comedic touch to the horror. Undoubtedly, it's a classic example of exploitation cinema that embraces its own absurdity and offers a ridiculously enjoyable cinematic experience for those who appreciate the strange and unusual in horror films.</p>

The Toxic Avenger (1984)

"The Toxic Avenger", an iconic film from '84, is a cult classic that follows the transformation of a weak young man into a mutant superhero after falling into a toxic waste barrel. The absurd plot and exaggerated scenes of violence make this movie as mischievous as it is entertaining.

The rudimentary special effects and deliberately exaggerated performances add a comedic touch to the horror. Undoubtedly, it's a classic example of exploitation cinema that embraces its own absurdity and offers a ridiculously enjoyable cinematic experience for those who appreciate the strange and unusual in horror films.

<p>"The Gingerdead Man" is a horror comedy that plays with the classic trope of possession films, but with a delightfully absurd twist: a serial killer reincarnated in the form of a gingerbread cookie.</p> <p>The ludicrous premise and deliberately ridiculous execution make this movie hilariously entertaining. The unconvincing special effects and exaggerated performances add to the comedic charm of the film.</p> <p>Clearly not meant to be taken seriously, it revels in its own absurdity and becomes a comedic horror experience that appeals to lovers of quirky and unconventional films.</p>

The Gingerdead Man (2005)

"The Gingerdead Man" is a horror comedy that plays with the classic trope of possession films, but with a delightfully absurd twist: a serial killer reincarnated in the form of a gingerbread cookie.

The ludicrous premise and deliberately ridiculous execution make this movie hilariously entertaining. The unconvincing special effects and exaggerated performances add to the comedic charm of the film.

Clearly not meant to be taken seriously, it revels in its own absurdity and becomes a comedic horror experience that appeals to lovers of quirky and unconventional films.

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How scary & violent the boogeyman is compared to other stephen king movies.

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Another Stephen King movie adaptation arrives by tackling one of the author's short stories, and here is how scary and violent The Boogeyman is compared to other adaptations. 2023 has already been a strong year for the horror genre with the likes of Evil Dead Rise , Scream VI , M3GAN , and Infinity Pool among the most thrilling entries to arrive so far. Three years after breaking out with Shudder's hit Host , director Rob Savage is taking on his biggest challenge yet, adapting one of Stephen King's works for the big screen with The Boogeyman .

The goal of terrifying audiences with The Boogeyman is the same as many other Stephen King movies . While some of his more revered story adaptations like The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile are not horror movies, the 2023 release from Disney and 20th Century wants to scare audiences similarly as IT and Doctor Sleep did recently or Carrie , Misery , and The Shining did decades ago. Those familiar with the short story the movie is based on know how terrifying it could be. Here is a guide to how scary and violent The Boogeyman is compared to other Stephen King movies.

The Boogeyman Is Among The Scariest Of Stephen King Movies

Thanks to how Rob Savage pulls off the adaptation, The Boogeyman is quite scary. The hype for how terrifying the adaptation was constant in the lead-up to its release. After stating that it was the scariest movie he ever directed, Savage claimed in an interview with SFX that The Boogeyman is actually the scariest Stephen King movie to date. This came after he revealed in an interview with Empire that the movie had to be recut following test screenings because the Boogeyman's unveiling was too scary. It left audiences screaming so loud they originally missed other moments before changes were made.

There are certainly plenty of big scares in The Boogeyman , including the major events that unfold once the Harper family encounters the Boogeyman. Since this showdown is saved for the movie's third act, the previous two acts of the story use tension to drive the scares. Not seeing the Boogeyman makes him even more terrifying in some ways, as audiences are just as nervous as The Boogeyman 's cast of what is haunting them. This allows several jump scares, as well as other genuinely frightening moments, to be included and make The Boogeyman scary, even when compared to other Stephen King movies.

The Boogeyman Is Less Violent Than Other Stephen King Movies

For as scary as the movie is, The Boogeyman 's violence is not that violent for a horror movie or Stephen King adaptation. This is partially due to the subject at hand and the way that Savage and the writers wanted to explore the family. However, it is also the result of The Boogeyman 's PG-13 rating . This designation by the MPAA automatically sets some parameters for the level of violence and gore that can be included. The Boogeyman is still violent in moments, but it can only get away with so much in PG-13, which is not typical for a Stephen King movie.

The majority of Stephen King movie adaptations receive R-ratings that allow them to push the boundaries more in terms of the violence and blood that is included. Despite The Boogeyman 's violent scenes, they do not come close to the graphic violence audiences have seen in other King movies. There is nothing quite close to memorable scenes like Pennywise biting off an arm in IT or the child murder in Doctor Sleep from recent years. The Boogeyman favors scares over violence as a result.

Sources: SFX , Empire

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