Jordan Peele’s Us is Bringing Back an Old Phobia

3/28/2019

Promotional Poster for the movie Us

Jordan Peele’s new horror film, Us has been released with amazing reviews once again for the director. Despite all the praise, it has made the public more aware of the fear and phobia of twins and doppelgangers.

Peele himself admitted during an interview with Seth Meyers that the whole inspiration for the movie was a strong fear of doppelgangers since his childhood. He went on to say,

“I always had this vision of seeing myself across the subway platform and just kind of thought, if that’s not creepy enough, what if the other you sort of smiled at you?”

Surprisingly, the fear of doppelgangers has been around for longer than you think. Doppelgangers were thought to be bad omens or beings who want to take over your life or are just generally ill-intentioned. The main superstition is that if the doppelgangers see each other either one or both will die shortly after.

Although it is not officially a recognised phobia, it doesn’t mean that people don’t have twin and doppelganger phobia. Several Twitter users have expressed they have the phobia themselves:

@amberjones2711 says “I think the scariest thing in the world would be seeing a doppelganger of yourself. I have like a weird obsessive phobia about it”.

@Brrisah, another Twitter user stated “Yeah so I have like a phobia of twins. Especially adults. If I’m in the same room as twin adults I get nauseous. Like dry heaving LOL #BrisaFacts”.

User @zzzenyatta tweeted “I wanna see us but also doppelgangers are kind of (absolutely) a huge fear of mine so like I wanna see it but do I wanna die lmao".