Close your eyes and imagine you are at a movie theatre. What are you watching? Are you watching a fear-inducing horror film, or are we escaping reality by getting lost in a fantasy film? Whatever film you choose for your viewing pleasure, you have an expectation of that film by its genre. Genre theory centers around how filmmakers define and distinguish genres; how movies are categorized into genres based on visual tropes (easy recognizable visual references) and plot conventions (elements in a film expected). Genre's most people are familiar with westerns, film noir, horror, romantic comedy, fantasy, gangster, musicals, and science fiction. Putting a film into one genre may be looked at as generalizing. Genres can cross over with one another, meaning films can fall into more than one category. The genre that will focus on this paper is horror and how Jordan Peele's film US (2019) expands beyond this category.

Horror films take a ride on the dark side to explore the odd, forbidden, and rare circumstances. They are designed to create frightening scenarios with anxiety. Horror triggers our worst fears to send us an overwhelming feeling of dread. They tell a terrifying tale in an astounding way to keep us on full alert while entertaining us simultaneously in a heart-racing experience. They meddle with our natural reactions deriving from fear, including nightmares, vulnerability, terror of the unknown, fear of death and dismemberment, loss of identity, or fear of sexuality. Low-key lighting will often carry out a dark, eerie atmosphere and make the audience feel vulnerable with intense anxiety. The low lights create shadows and silhouettes that play into the unknown's fear, especially in the dark. Many of these horror conventions are displayed in Jordan Peele's film Us (2019).

At the beginning of Us, it is explained that there are many underground tunnels with no known purpose all over the United States. Flashed back to 1986, you see a young Adelaide Wilson watching a commercial for Hands Across America. Later that night at Santa Cruz Boardwalk, she wanders away from her parents and enters a find yourself here funhouse. As Adelaide walks the dark house of mirrors, she encounters an identical doppelganger, leaving her traumatized. Flash forward to Adelaide's heads out on vacation with her husband Gabe, son Jason, and daughter Zora to Santa Cruz. Feeling apprehensive, Adelaide meets up with friends Josh and Kitty on the same beach that caused her anxiety and trauma during her childhood.

Before leaving the beach, Jason sees a stranger that looks oddly like the older man carried away by paramedics on their way to the area.

Later that evening at Wilson's vacation home, Adelaide gets an uneasy feeling something terrible will happen. She then explains to her husband, Gabe, what happened to her at the beach when she was a child. Moments later, her son yells out that a family is standing at the end of their driveway. Panicked by her fears, Adelaide calls the police for help while Gabe heads out the door to confront the family. Dark shadows cast over the unknown family as Gabe asks them to leave their property. The family eerily stands in the darkness silent and then begins to charge at Gabe. The family dressed in red enters their vacation home, and to Wilson's dismay, they discover this is a family doppelganger. Red, Adelaide's double, explains they are tethered. She says they share a soul with their doppelganger, and they have come to "untether" themselves. Red tells the Wilsons a story of a girl who lives a life of comfort and joy while her "shadow" suffers in the dark, living a horrific mirrored version of the girl's life and hating her for it.

The Wilsons get split up then terrorized by their doubles until Gabe manages to kill his double and get the family together on a boat. They head to their friends Josh and Kitty's home to discover them ambushed and killed by their doppelgangers. The Wilsons kill their friend's doppelgangers and then find on the news that everyone has a double that is wreaking havoc on the city. Adelaide notices the doubles joining hands in a way like the Hands Across America commercial she watched as a child. Heading to the coast, the Wilsons kill Jason's and Zora's doubles in the slaughtered town. On the boardwalk, Red takes Jason, causing Adelaide to go after him. Adelaide ends up in an underground tunnel on the beach where she finds red. Red goes on to tell the story of the tethered. She explains they are a failed government experiment that controlled their counterparts above ground. The tethered were left to rot and survived on rabbit meat. Red discovered she was different and had to plan her revenge by taking the lives of the counterparts.

Red and Adelaide begin to fight. Red counter reacts to all of Adelaide's unbalanced attacks. Then red goes to attack Adelaide, fails, and gets impaled by fireplace poker and strangled to death. Adelaide rescues Jason from a locker. As the film ends, "Adelaide" gets a flashback to the funhouse mirrors where young Red strangles her and switches places with her. Jason sees something odd in his mother's eyes as she smirks at him, and the film ends.

Two horror conventions displayed in Us are the use of low-key lighting and loss of identity. Low-key lighting is used throughout the entire film. The Red family scene is discovered in the driveway and filmed in the dark with shadows cast over their bodies. Inability to see in the darkness gives a fear of the unknown and makes the audience fear the family waiting at the end of their driveway. As part of the plot twist, Adelaide experiences the loss of her identity. At the end of the film, Adelaide has a flashback to the funhouse, and it alludes to Adelaide being Red after her and swapped places that choked her. The ending leaves you wondering if they genuinely swapped places or if it's Adelaide's trauma making her imagine fake scenarios. The third convention in Us is the portrayal of a monster. This convention makes Us cross over into the science fiction genre. Adelaide's doppelganger Red is also known as the tethered, terrorizes her, trying to kill her to take her place.

In conclusion, low-key lighting and the loss of identity in the film Us make it fall into the horror genre. Creating fear that puts the audience on the edge of their seats are conventions of horror films. Recognizing patterns to place a movie into a genre sets the expectation of what you are about to view. While Us is categorized as a horror film, its portrayal of monsters falls into the science fiction genre. Genre theory proves that movies are not limited to being generalized into one category, but with multiple uses of conventions can cross over into other genres.