Why Jordan Peele’s “Us” Gave Me a Panic Attack

I saw Us alone at the Alamo Drafthouse theater in Brooklyn. I often see horror movies alone. I was excited. But then a young Adelaide saw herself in the funhouse on the beach, and something changed. My anticipation started to turn to panic. The tethered came into their home, cornered them, toyed with them, and I felt just as trapped. I wanted to get up and leave, but I didn’t. I watched to the end, to the reveal of Adelaide’s true identity as one of the tethered, to happy music played over a shot of the thousands of tethered lined up along a mountain side. Then I walked back home, quickly, so quickly my calves were sore. The sun was going down and my heart was beating fast, and in my mind, I kept thinking of this quote from the scariest horror game I’ve ever seen: “The only me is me; are you sure the only you is you?” (P.T., 2014).

The goal of this essay is to figure out why this movie gave me, an avid horror fan, an actual panic attack, so let’s start with a quick synopsis. Us is a 2019 horror movie written and directed by Jordan Peele that follows Adelaide, her husband Gabe, and their children Zora and Jason as they visit their vacation home in Santa Cruz, California. But that’s not where the movie opens. Instead, the story starts with a young Adelaide on a trip with her parents at the same beach in Santa Cruz. When Adelaide wanders away from her parents, she ends up lost in a hall of mirrors, where she encounters a girl that looks exactly like her. When we’re shown Adelaide as an adult, we see how apprehensive she is of going to the beach. Eventually, she explains to Gabe why she’s been so on edge: she’s always been afraid of this girl that looked like her, always felt like she was coming after her. Soon, her horrors are realized when a family that looks just like hers shows up at their vacation home: Adelaide’s duplicate, Red; Gabe’s duplicate, Abraham; Zora’s duplicate, Umbrae; Jason’s duplicate, Pluto. Red explains herself to them, tells them about the tethered, the soulless clones created by the US government in a failed effort to control the American people. She tells them how unfair it was to be attached, or tethered if you will, to someone, to have no control over what you do with your life, having to shadow everything your duplicate does. So she came to the surface for revenge. The movie from this point follows Adelaide’s family as they avoid, outsmart, and even kill their duplicates, finding out along the way that it’s not only their tethered who have come up from below ground, but all of America’s. The movie ends with Adelaide following Red down into the tunnels under the very same hall of mirrors where the two first met, and, after a bit of a struggle, Adelaide manages to kill Red. Well, that’s not entirely true. The movie really ends with a flashback, a reveal that Red was the little girl we saw at the beginning who wandered off and got lost. Adelaide was originally the one who was tethered, but she attacked Red, dragged her down into the tunnels, and replaced her on the surface. This closes off the movie in an uncomfortable gray area where you’re not sure if the person you’d been rooting for the whole time was who you should’ve been rooting for.

In order to analyze why this movie freaked me out so much, I’ll be looking at Sigmund Freud’s concept of the “uncanny”. Something that is uncanny is something that arouses feelings of “dread or horror” (219). Freud starts out the construction of his concept by going through the definitions of the German word for uncanny, unheimlich, and it’s opposite, heimlich. According to those definitions, something that is heimlich is something that is homey and comfortable, but also something that is concealed and kept out of sight. This leads to the understanding that something unheimlich is something “that ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light” (Freud 224).

Freud gives several examples of what he describes as being uncanny, but the main one I’ll focus on is that of the double or a doubling of one’s self. The idea of the double was “originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego […] but when this stage is surmounted, the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death” (Freud 235). He also connects this doubling of the self to the idea of the conscience and the feeling of being watched or judged. Because humans have the ability to self-reflect, it makes it possible for this self-criticizing aspect of one’s ego to become “dissociated from the ego […] [treating] the rest of the ego like an object” and giving “the old idea of a ‘double a new meaning” (Freud 235).

Freud also examines the concept of the uncanny that Jentsch constructed in which uncanny feelings are brought on “when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one” (Freud 233). I’ll also be using this interpretation of the uncanny along with Lacan’s concept of “the mirror stage” which, simply put, is the point in which an infant first recognizes themselves in a mirror.

So, if we’re going to figure out why Us freaked me out so much, we’re going to have to tie these concepts back into the movie starting with Freud’s idea of the uncanny. Us is definitely an uncanny movie, just in the sense of its concept in general. Just with the definition of unheimlich being something that should’ve stayed secret coming to light, the movie becomes uncanny even without the doubles. The whole idea is that the tethered were a secret government project, one that was literally buried and left underground when it failed. Red leading the tethered to the surface is already uncanny in the broadest sense of the word.

One of the specific examples of uncanniness that Freud mentions is that of an unintentional repetition. This is like when you see the same number on a clock that you just saw on an address that’s also today’s date. While, in reality, all of these things occurring in sequence are just coincidences, for most people, it’s hard to not attribute some kind of meaning onto it, usually a negative one. For Freud, this kind of magical thinking stems from the “animistic stages” of early humanity, a stage of development that still leaves marks on many of us, leading us to fear these kinds of coincidences (Freud 240). He believes that we put so much power in these kinds of coincidences because we all fear “a secret intention of [others] doing [us] harm, and certain signs are taken to mean that that intention has the necessary power at its command” (Freud 240).

There are many instances of repetition in Us. Besides the repetition of the self in the tethered, there’s also a repetition of the numbers 11:11. It’s at the start of the movie when the TV show the “11 at 11” news channel, at the boardwalk with the man holding the Jeremiah 11:11 sign, scratched into the forehead of that man’s tethered, and later on the clock in Adelaide’s beach house. Since the second time we see this number (and probably the first time we notice it), it’s associated with a bible verse, the audience’s first impulse will probably be to ascribe the meaning of that verse onto the characters of the movie. Jeremiah 11:11 says, “Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.” Though most people in the audience wouldn’t know the meaning of this verse off the top of their heads, a lot of them probably look it up afterwards, ignoring the context of the surrounding verses, and influencing their next viewing of them film. Maybe the tethered were sent to the surface by God as punishment. Maybe the tethered were the ones being punished. Either way, I didn’t spend nearly enough time in church to know what that verse meant before I saw the movie, so that wasn’t what freaked me out. And while repetition like that would certainly freak me out in real life, in a movie, it’s just a thematic element that my writing major brain can applaud the screenwriter for, which means this wasn’t the culprit of my anxiety.

As I mentioned before, Freud also examines Jentsch’s idea of the uncanny along with his own. For Jentsch, something is uncanny when something inanimate become animate or when you can’t tell if it’s alive or not. Jentsch uses things like robots and wax figures as examples, and I feel like this can apply to the idea of the tethered as well. For most people, the only time they see someone who looks like them is in a mirror, and if that’s the case, then an encounter with their double could be seen as encountering their reflection come to life. It’s reasonable to say that meeting your double would cause an uncanny feeling, an uncertainty of the reality of your situation and your surroundings, leading to anxiety and fear. However, in an effort to dispute Jentsch’s concept, Freud brings up the idea of a child’s toy coming to life, remarking at how most children would find that fantastic rather than scary. But Freud has obviously never seen Child’s Play or Annabelle. To me, whether or not an inanimate object coming to life is scary or not depends on your initial feelings towards that object and the intentions of that object once it comes to life. So, if that’s the case, then why would your reflection coming to life be scary? It’s just you, isn’t it? So your initial feelings towards it would be mostly positive, right?

Now you might be thinking, “Judith, the tethered had bad intentions, that’s why they were scary,” or “Judith, the reason you freaked out so much was because you had a nightmare once as a kid where you were locked on a school bus during a class trip, and there was another you leaving with the class, and she looked at you and smiled as you banged on the window in an effort to warn everyone that that wasn’t the real you.” And those observations would be correct. Surprisingly. I… don’t know how you knew about that dream. However, they don’t explain the deeper psychology behind my panic. Yes, we have the fact that the tethered shouldn’t be alive or real and they’re trying to kill everyone, but why is the fact that they’re doubles make them even scarier? For Freud, the concept of the double is unsettling because it leads to a splitting of the ego, or one’s sense of self. One encountering their double leads to them “[identifying themselves] with someone else, so that [they are] in doubt as to which [their] self is, or [substituting] the extraneous self for [their] own” (Freud 234). This kind of internalized split, this doubting of one’s own reality and validity, has a distressing and weakening effect on the ego. Dividing the self into two automatically lessens the sense of self as a whole, causing discomfort and fear. It’s a sudden questioning of one’s own surroundings, of who they are and who they’ve been. It causes a “regression to a time when the ego had not yet marked itself sharply from the external world and from other people” (Freud 236).

Speaking of the formation of the ego, let’s hop over to Lacan’s mirror stage. The mirror stage is the point in child development in which a baby is able to tell that their reflection is them and not another person. According to Lacan, this recognition is what forms the ego. However, this form of the ego is one that “will forever remain irreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming, no matter how successful the dialectical syntheses by which [one] must resolve, as I, [their] discordance with [their] own reality” (Lacan 94). This creates what is known as the ideal ego, the version of ourselves that we wish to be but can never truly achieve. Now, the only reason this imago, or idealized version of ourselves is created is because the version of ourselves that we see, our reflection can only ever be surface level. It’s the same as when you admire a role model or celebrity: you only see their exteriors, what they show the world, and you never get a glimpse of the mess going on inside of them. So, not only does the mirror stage create the ego, it also creates an idealized ego, and “through identification with the imago of one’s [semblance] and the drama of primordial jealousy […] the I [turns] into an apparatus to which every instinctual pressure constitutes a danger, even if it corresponds to a natural maturation process” (Lacan 98).

So if the ideal ego can become this much of a perceived threat without even being tangible, then it makes even more sense that a physical double would be terrifying. Not only is it a threat because it shakes the ego into questioning it’s reality, it poses a threat in the sense that this other you, from the outside, seems like a better version of you, a you that you can never live up to. Meaning that not only are the tethered scary because they’re trying to kill everyone or because they destabilize the sense of self, but they also bring to mind the fear of not being able to live up to the idealized ego. The tethered actively trying to kill and replace their duplicates makes the idea that your double is a better version of you so much more palpable. This isn’t even taking into account how this is actually what happens in the movie. Adelaide (or, technically Red) is dragged underground as a child and replaced by the tethered version of herself, and no one even realizes it isn’t her. Meaning no one missed her. Red was completely and seamlessly replaced by another (possibly better) version of herself.

The terrifying thing about Us is the doubles, not because they’re trying to kill everyone, but because they represent the part of us that fears that we’re replaceable, that we are not the best version of ourselves. They threaten the fragility of the ego, shaking the sense of self, causing discomfort. And panic.

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny’.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: The Hogarth Press and the Instute of Psycho-Analysis, n.d.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Ecrits. n.d. 93-100.

P.T. Dir. Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro, Kojima Productions / Kojima Digital Entertainment, 2014. Sony PlayStation 4 game.

The Bible. Vol. Authorized King James Version. n.d.

Us. Dir. Jordan Peele. Perf. Lupita Nyong’o, et al. 2019.