Jordan Peele Made Lupita Nyong’o Watch These 10 Horror Movies To Prepare For His Next Movie, ‘Us’

Jordan Peele’s directorial debut, Get Out, made over $250 million at the box office on a $4.5 million budget and was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, which Peele won. Not too shabby for the guy behind “Gremlins 2 Brainstorm.” For his follow-up, Peele enlisted fellow Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II for the Funny Games-sounding Us.

Little was known about the feature, other than scissors are involved, until Peele discussed the film at length (although still cautiously and cryptically) with Entertainment Weekly. “For my second feature, I wanted to create a monster mythology,” he said. “I wanted to do something that was more firmly in the horror genre but still held on to my love of movies that are twisted but fun.”

The story is set in the present day and follows Adelaide and Gabe Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke) as they take their kids to Adelaide’s old childhood beachside home in Northern California for the summer. After a day at the beach with the Tyler family (which includes Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker), Adelaide — who’s haunted by a lingering trauma from her past — becomes increasingly more paranoid that something bad will happen to her family. As night falls, the Wilsons see four figures holding hands and standing silently at the bottom of their driveway… (Via)

Peele made Nyong’o watch 10 horror movies to prepare for the role: Dead Again, The Shining, The Babadook, It Follows, A Tale of Two Sisters, The Birds, Funny Games, Martyrs, Let the Right One In, and The Sixth Sense. That’s a good list! It’s a mix of old classics (The Birds, The Shining), new favorites (It Follows, The Babadook), foreign films (A Tale of Two Sisters, Martyrs, Let the Right One In), and, uh, Dead Again, a romantic-thriller starring Kenneth Branagh. Will Lupita see dead (again) people? We’ll find out on March 15, 2019, when Us opens, with a trailer that debuts on Christmas Day.

(Via Entertainment Weekly)