I Experienced the Horror of Jordan Peele’s ‘US’ at Halloweeen Horror Nights

If you haven’t watched US, Jordan Peele’s follow-up to the genre-bending hit Get Out, you really should. The central performances by Lupita N’yongo are instantly iconic; the movie is gorgeously shot; and beyond the whole horrifying “getting stabbed with scissors” thing, it’s a complexly layered and intricately thought out exploration through the underbelly of America’s psyche.

That all said, it’s a difficult concept to distill down into a bunch of jump-scares, which is what one might expect when visiting a haunted house (called mazes) at Universal Orlando’s annual Halloween Horror Nights event. Thankfully, unlike some of the other mazes, which rely on spooky statues and “scare actors” (the folks hired by Universal to scream at you) popping their heads around the corner while holding a knife, the US maze mostly eschews those conventions in favor of something much, much scarier: following Adelaide’s (N’yongo) descent into the nightmare world of the Tethered over the course of the movie.

If you still haven’t watched the movie since I implored you to do so two paragraphs up, here’s the gist. When Adelaide was just a kid, she wandered off at the beach and found herself in a funhouse full of mirrors. There, she saw another little girl, dressed like her; her exact double. Years later, Adelaide is taking a family trip to the same beach, and disturbing memories start rising to the surface. She repeatedly implores her husband (played hilariously by Winston Duke) to leave, but it’s already too late. That night, a family that looks exactly like them with some differences — specifically that they all can’t talk, dress in red jumpsuits and are holding the aforementioned golden scissors — shows up, and terrorizes them.

Without spoiling all of the twists, it turns out those doubles — the Tethered — aren’t the only ones, and it leads Adelaide back to that funhouse and down into a series of tunnels that run all over the… Wait for it… U.S.

That’s the path you follow at Halloween Horror Nights, and it is not only absolutely terrifying psychologically to experience what Adelaide experiences over the course of the movie, it’s also beautifully designed. For those who haven’t attended one of these events before, push all thoughts of dinky skeletons at carnival haunted houses out of your mind. The designers at Universal Orlando work year round with the production companies from the movies and TV shows they license IP from to intricately recreate the sets from the property.

It kicks off with you walking down a long curtained hallway, Christmas lights strung overhead. As you retreat from the din of the theme park outside, Luniz and Michael Marshall’s “Tethered Mix” of “I Got 5 On It” picks up in volume until that’s all you can hear. Then you turn the corner, and it’s raining on the beach as you stare directly in the gaping maw of the funhouse Adelaide enters as a kid. Let me repeat that: it is raining on the beach. One of my favorite effects they pull off at Halloween Horror Nights is when it’s lightly snowing potato flakes, but this ups that a million. It is really, truly raining, giving you the choice to wait outside and get wet, or enter the funhouse.

Of course you do, and you wander down the hall of mirrors (check out that dinky mechanical owl from the movie!) and get your first glimpse of the Tethered in the form of Red, the little girl who will grow up to become N’yongo’s monstrous double. Again, here’s where things go the extra mile. Last year when Universal Orlando first brought Stranger Things to the park they took the extra step to add actors who look like the kids in the Netflix show. Here, we get the same thing, and seeing little Red, a real person and not a statue, standing behind what looks like a mirror adds to the horror of the outing.

If you’re not already running away screaming at the thought of that, you walk through the rest of the movie — and again, it’s not what jumps at you that’s scary, so much as the design and tension. Sure, Abraham (Duke’s Tethered) barking at you while holding a bat will make you jump, as will Pluto, the masked double of Adelaide’s son crawling on the floor like a dog. But the really scary moments are scare actors playing Red pacing in Adelaide’s living room, her face in shadow. Red’s voice playing low over the speakers, revealing the truth about the world. There’s even a section where it opens up into the house owned by rich a-holes Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker), which does rely more on bloody props than people; but walking through a wide open space where you can actually see the Tethered coming, or just staring at you, not knowing when they’ll make a mov is straight out of the movie.

And then you have to return to the funhouse one more time, descending into the home of the Tethered. There’s a section here where you don’t even see any actors for a good length of time, you’re just walking though their empty hallways and beds, looking at loose bunnies and perfectly folded clothing… Until you get to the end, and they’re all lined up, holding their hands across America. As you walk the length of the room, only one out of every five or so Tethered is a real person, emphasizing the theme of the movie, that you don’t know who you can trust. Yes, reader: I ran for my life.

Other houses at this year’s event may have made me scream more (there’s an original house called “Graveyard Games” that made me holler like a baby), but the US house is truly not just like walking through the movie, but living it. Why would someone want to do this to themselves? Why walk through a living nightmare? As Red says in the movie, a huge smile on her face and eyes wide: “we’re Americans.”

Halloween Horror Nights runs at Universal Orlando through November 2.

Where to stream US