Los Angeles: Lupita Nyong'o – star of new horror thriller 'Us'– says watching the movie back for the first time was overwhelming. "There was a lot coming at me and I didn't really fully take it in," says the actress.
The second time she watched it, however, was an "electrifying" experience.
"I watched it at the premiere in South by Southwest," explains Nyong'o, "and just to experience it through other people experiencing it really helped to kind of get out of my own way and see it for what it was."
'Us'is the second movie from writer-director Jordan Peele, following his wildly successful and critically acclaimed 2017 debut 'Get Out'.
It stars Nyong'o and Winston Duke as Adelaide and Gabe Wilson, a married couple who along with their two children, travel to the Californian town of Santa Cruz for a relaxing vacation.
Once there, however, their visit is marked by strange occurrences and coincidences and culminates in the Wilsons being terrorized by what appear to be their doppelgangers.
"On the surface, I had never seen a horror film with a black family in the center of it," says Peele, who uses horror conventions to create not only scares but also a satirical commentary on race relations in America.
"(Horror films) that resonate and that work," he continues, "work for a reason and it's because there's something in the ether, in the zeitgeist that, a fear that it's addressing."
Duke says that the core of 'Us'is about "a family trying to move their lives forward" who "encounter this horrific experience."
But, he adds, there's also "all the cultural significance of the commentary that's happening."
For Peele, these two elements – the surface level horror narrative and the deeper satirical commentary – go hand in hand.
"They're black," he says of the Wilsons. "There is there is a key moment where (Gabe) code switches and he changes the sound of his voice to be intimidating and sort of like approaches that a more stereotypically black vernacular for that moment.
"That's some real stuff," smiles Peele. "That's kind of how I operate."
'Us' is scheduled to hit Indian screens on March 29.
