The 17 Most Striking Pop Culture References and Easter Eggs in Jordan Peele's Us

The very first scene in the film is of an old-school TV playing an ad for the 1986 event Hands Across America. Next to the TV are a few shelves holding VHS tapes, and The Goonies is one of them. On top of that, a monologue at the end of the film by Red, Adelaide's evil doppelganger, includes the phrase "It's our time," which is a reference to Mikey's (Sean Astin) wistful speech in the 1985 film.

The Goonies isn't the only tape on the shelf in the opening scene — a copy of C.H.U.D. is also there. If you haven't seen it, the 1984 horror-slash-sci-fi flick from director Douglas Cheek imagines what would happen if a bunch of murderous, humanoid monsters began pouring out of the sewers under New York City to seek revenge on humans. (The title of the film stands for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers, FYI.)

If you've seen Us, hopefully you understand why Peele decided to include a nod to a film about creatures rising up from below to take over. But the reference actually goes even deeper: Peele has a direct connection to the horror movie.

"Fun fact: My first girlfriend's father directed C.H.U.D., when I was, like, 11 or 12 or something like that," he said in an interview with Polygon. "Her father was Douglas Cheek. So that was my introduction to C.H.U.D. So there's a little personal thing for me."

Throughout the first half of the film Jason Wilson (Evan Alex) wears a t-shirt with the toothy shark from the Jaws movie poster printed on the front. The t-shirt makes a lot of sense a few scenes into the movie, when Jason briefly wanders off while his family is hanging out at the boardwalk in Santa Cruz.

After Jason strays from the group, his mother Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong'o) begins frantically looking around the beach, out at the ocean, and through the crowd in search of her son, before getting up and actually sprinting through the sand and screaming his name in an attempt to find him. For anyone who has seen Steven Spielberg's 1975 film about a certain bloodthirsty shark, the beats in this scene should feel eerily familiar.

As Adelaide combs the beach with her eyes, she tries in vain to ignore the ramblings of her friend, Kitty (Elisabeth Moss), who is obliviously chattering away beside her. It's an extremely similar set up to the scene in Jaws when Sheriff Brody (Roy Scheider) is scanning the water in search of a shark as a busybody from town complains about people parking in front of his house.

The plastic mask that Jason wears seems to be a take on Chewbacca's likeness in the Star Wars films, what with the slicked-back hair and white fangs. Is there a complex meaning associated with it? Eh . . . maybe. If you really want to get deep with it, perhaps you could make a case that Chewbacca has trouble communicating with people outside his immediate circle, like Jason. (But really, it's probably just because Jason is a little kid who likes Star Wars.)

Other fans have also posited that the mask isn't Chewbacca at all, but rather a werewolf. Since there are a ton of references to "Thriller" throughout the movie, this would totally make sense.

In one of Us's first scenes, we see the childhood version of Adelaide (played by Madison Curry) on the Santa Cruz boardwalk with her mother and father. Not only does The Lost Boys take place in Santa Cruz, but its opening scene was filmed at the same boardwalk, and includes a sequence of the characters on the carousel. Adelaide's mother makes reference to this part of the 1987 vampire film when she says, "You know they're shooting a movie over there by the carousel."

Peele is a noted fan of Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining, to the point that he recreated one of the outfits that deranged writer Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) wears in the film during a press event for Us. But that's not the only way he pays homage to the film: there are also some very, very creepy twins in the mix! Lindsey and Becca (actresses Noelle and Cali Sheldon) are the twin teen daughters of Wilson family friends Kitty and Josh, and suffer a brutal end when they're stabbed to death by their doppelgangers in gory fashion. In short? Blood + twins = nightmares.

When little Adelaide is on the boardwalk with her parents, her father wins her a shirt at an arcade attraction that has images from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" music video all over it. Her mom remarks that Adelaide better not "get any nightmares" from the shirt, not realizing that the true terror that would befall her daughter was lurking just under the boardwalk.

As I mentioned earlier, the opening scene takes place in 1986 and features a television commercial for Hands Across America. It was a real charity event held in order to raise awareness about famine in Africa and homelessness in the US, involving 6.5 million people linking hands on Sunday, May 25, 1986 to form a human chain. The benefit ended up raising $34 million, but less than half of that money went to the cause due to large promotional costs.

So, why does Peele include Hands Across America so heavily in his film? The event is essentially acts as an allegoric backbone for the presence of the evil doubles that takes up the back half of Us. Not only is the charity event likely one of the last things young Adelaide remembers before she's cruelly doomed to the world of the Tethereds underground, with Red assuming her spot up above, but it's also a metaphor for how often people in the upper and middle class turn a blind eye to the poor who struggle with the impossibility of rising above their station.

When Red and her Tethered family descend upon Adelaide's home the first night of their vacation, the movie swerves into the home invasion thriller genre. Seeing the evil doppelgangers terrorize both the Wilsons and Josh and Kitty's family, is tense and horrifying in many ways, and I couldn't help but be reminded of the demented killers in Funny Games (both the 1997 and 2007 versions).

In both versions of the film, two initially unassuming men show up at the lakeside vacation home of a family one evening and proceed to take them hostage and torture them throughout the night. At one point someone's leg is shattered with a golf club.

Coincidentally, when Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) enters Josh and Kitty's home to try to save her mother — who is dragged inside and held hostage by Kitty's Tether — her weapon of choice is a golf club. She uses it to beat one of the twin's evil doppelgangers to death, and also attacks Kitty's double with it.

In an interview with Polygon, Peele mentioned that some of the inspiration for Us came from a 1960 Twilight Zone episode called "Mirror Image," which follows a woman being haunted by an identical version of herself.

"There's something about this idea that the doppelganger that has this creepy smile . . . they know more than you know," Peele explained. "I was sort of connecting that to, first and foremost, our fear — our societal fear — of terrorism, of an attack, of an invader coming in who has been plotting something mysterious. Beside the fact that this is an awful event is the idea that there is a well-oiled plan. And, the only other thing that's more terrifying than that is the suppressed feelings of what our part in these tragedies is, even if we are the victim."

The "creepy smile" aspect of the doppelganger fear that Peele mentions is certainly present in Zora's double, Umbrae, who even Red describes as a "monster."

What is it with horror movies and small children singing creepy, slowed-down lullabies? Us's take on the trope comes in the form of young Adelaide whistling "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider" as she nervously makes her way through the hall of mirrors attraction at the boardwalk. At first it seems like her voice is echoing off the glass that surrounds her, but becomes clear that, no — someone else is singing an identical version of the tune somewhere in the room with her.

Later on in the film, we discover that Red and Adelaide actually originated as their opposites — the little girl living a normal life with her parents was knocked out and dragged down to the world of the Tethered underneath the hall of mirrors the night of her birthday by little Red, who switched places with her in the world above, with her parents none the wiser. After a bloody showdown between adult Adelaide and Red, the latter is stabbed and uses her last breaths to whistle the song one last time.

Cue the chills.

This specific Bible verse appears twice in Us: little Adelaide passes a homeless man on the boardwalk holding up a cardboard sign with the verse, and later during the Tethered uprising, his doppelganger carves "11:11" into his own forehead. Generally, the verse refers to God's warning to the Jews that he'll turn his back on them if they continue to worship false idols.

Per the King James version of the Bible, it reads: "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."

As for why Peele included it, the verse could be seen as a warning from the Tethered that they were about to "bring evil upon" the people above ground. "11:11" pops up again at other points in the film, though, like when Jason points out the hour to Adelaide on a clock in his bedroom. The numbers are also four of the same, which could be yet another emphasis on the importance of duplicates in Us.

Yep, the director has a subtle, but nightmarish cameo in Us — during a scene when one of the many lab rabbits in the underground tunnels occupied by the Tethered dies in gruesome fashion, its last squeals of terror were actually voiced by Peele. He did a similar cameo in Get Out, when he provided the sounds for a dying deer at the beginning of the film.

The dark remix of the 1995 hip-hop song blew up after the trailer for the movie first came out, and plays a few times in the movie. The most memorable time it plays is during the first act of the film, when the Wilson family are driving around Santa Cruz. "It's about drugs," Zora tells her younger brother, before her father, Gabe (Winston Duke) cuts her off, proclaiming, "It's not about drugs. Don't do drugs."

So, um, yeah it is about drugs. Specifically, the hook references someone throwing down half for a dime bag of pot. But for Peele, the song held a different meaning in the context of the film:

"That song, it came pretty simple, I'm making a movie in Northern California, that's a Bay Area hip-hop classic and I wanted to explore this very relatable journey of being a parent [and] maybe some of the songs you listened to back in the day aren't appropriate for your kids," he told EW. "So that was one level, and another part was, I love songs that have a great feeling but also have a haunting element to them and I feel like the beat in that song has this inherent cryptic energy, almost reminiscent of the Nightmare on Elm Street soundtrack . . . also, it's just a dope track."

Another great track that plays in the film is "F*ck Tha Police" by N.W.A. As Kitty bleeds out on the floor from a fatal stab wound dealt to her by her scissor-wielding Tether, she asks the smart-home device in her living room — which goes by Ophelia, rather than Alexa — to call the police. Unfortunately, Ophelia is on #TeamTethered, and blasts this song instead.

Another fun, unexpected music cue that joins Michael Abels's straight-up haunting score is The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations." The contrast between its poppy, upbeat sound with the visuals of Josh and Kitty being stabbed to death is . . . wow. Nightmares.