Jordan Peele s work sits on your chest and stays there for a while after youve left the theater. This was true of his Academy Award-winning Get Out, but maybe even more so with his sophomore follow-up, Us.

Dont get it confused. Us is not Get Out. The latter reminded audiences of the ever-present danger of liberal white racism, while the new film shines a mirror up to well us. All of us. In a tweet the Sunday before its nationwide release, Peele clarified that Us is a horror film . Its not for the faint of heart. Its very much a social thriller, but it also scares the shit out of you.

The film, which premieres March 22, stars Lupita Nyongo, Winston Duke, Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex. It follows a family as they visit their vacation home near where Nyongos character, Adelaide Wilson, first met her doppelgnger, Red, as a child. She reunites with Red and finds that her entire family and everyone else has an underworld twin. They are forced to literally face themselves. Its a mindfuck, yall.

The human race is born of much duality, Peele told HuffPost in a phone interview. Our negative aspects, we tend to not face and deal with because theyre unpleasant, but that includes our fears and our guilt.

In conversation with Tananarive Due, a UCLA lecturer and the executive producer of the documentary Horror Noire, Peele revealed the idea for this film was based on his own fear that stemmed from a daydream.

I used to go down the subway in New York, go underneath the underpass to go to the other side of the subway late at night, and nobody else is on the platform, and look across and imagine, What if I saw myself going in where I had just gone? And that shuddered me to my core.

Inspired by America, he said at the South by Southwest premiere, Us explores what happens when the enemy is closer than you think. The plot makes you paranoid and introspective at the same time. This country will do that to you anyway.

I think that this movie applies in any version of us versus them, Peele told HuffPost. Whether were talking on the level of your family versus the family across the street, your race versus another race, your socioeconomic class versus another, or the idea of us being Americans against the rest of the world. I think we are conditioned to point the finger at them. This movie says we need to point the finger at ourselves, at us. We are often our own worst enemy. Whatever facets that were talking about.

As intended, Us takes on different meanings from different angles. It mirrors a duality Peele knows very well. With his roots in comedy, some folks scratched their heads when they heard one half of Key & Peele was taking his talents to the horror genre. But both of his big-screen directorial efforts masterfully intertwine comedy with gore and suspense. Its all very intentional.

What wasnt intentional, the filmmaker said, is the racial commentary in and surrounding the film. That was more intuitive. Casting a dark-skinned family to star in a blockbuster horror, repurposing a hood classic like Lunizs I Got 5 on It as a haunting anthem, and prioritizing black journalists, celebrities and influencers at the first screenings are all unheard of. Yet here we are. Add that he gave Howard University a nod and hosted a screening with the cast at the historically black institution.

Us may not be a black film, but its black as hell in essence.