The Jordan Peele Universe

**Spoiler Warning for “Us” and “Get Out”**

“Us” is currently in theatres and on top of being a thriller that is a cut above all the rest, it is also the kind of movie that allows your mind to continue to runaway with the themes, foreshadowing moments, homages and clues presented throughout the film.  This is a very welcomed and familiar feeling that “Get Out” also inspired in the minds of audiences everywhere.  Both films say something deeper about our current social and/or political climate, but they also contain their own deeper lore that may bleed into each other.  It is my suspicion that Jordan Peele is secretly creating his own horror shared universe, and that the key to peeling away the veil to his concealed universe, is a certain secret society. Specifically, the Knights Templar.

Jeremy on the hunt with his Knights Templar helmet

In “Get Out” we see Jeremy dawning a knight helmet as a reference to the Knights Templar.  Peele even states in the commentary that he came up with an entire backstory for the secret society seen in the movie.  They are supposedly decedents of the original Knight’s Templar and are still seeking the Holy Grail of immortality and godhood. Of course in “Get Out,” they find immortality by switching their minds into young, physically superior bodies.  But really, this is just the latest Knight Templar scheme in a long mission that started with their formation in 1119 A.D.  Since then, they have been seeking immortality and power through any means necessary.

The ancient quest for the Holy Grail, or in this case, immortality

Enter “Us.”  In the film, we learn that humans have successfully been able to clone the human body, but not the soul.  The created clones’ bodies share one soul that is tethered to the original body.  However, Jordan Peele intentionally does not go into the specifics of who is responsible for cloning, building the underground facility, or the original reasons for doing so.  What is said in the movie is that humans created the facility and clones to use them as a means to control the original bodies like puppets. How could people who set out to secretly clone the human body have known that the manipulation of the source human was in the realm of possibility? It seems that this manipulation just happened to be a side effect of the cloning process but the original program to clone the human body involved a different end goal. Clearly, by 1986, the starting of the events in “Us,” the facility and the cloning program had long been abandoned, leaving the duplicates to fend for themselves.

An already iconic image that perfectly foreshadows what’s to come

As you may have already guessed, I am implying that the creators of the clones and the architects of the massive underground facility are actually the Knights Templar.  Originally, they developed the cloning technology to further their mission for immortality.  If they were able to clone themselves indefinitely, they would achieve their goal of essentially living forever.  But the result was not what they expected.  The Knights Templar quickly realized that the doppelgangers state of mind was compromised due to the shared souls.  However, all was not lost as they discovered that the connection between the two individual bodies could lead to world domination!  By controlling the clones, the Knights Templar could potentially dominate the surface people like puppets on strings.  Unfortunately for the secret society, things didn’t go as planned and they were unable to maintain authority or control over the duplicates.  This led to the society abandoning their experiments and the facility.

What the secret society didn’t count on was that much like the Japanese island, Ōkunoshima, famous for being overrun with rabbits when abandoned, the underground facility somehow grew out of control. By modern day, the army of doppelgangers was large enough to invade the surface in an unprecedented coup of immense proportions.

I think it is fitting that the descendants of the Knights Templar had a dual approach in conquering the world as seen in “Us.” They want to gain immortality or be the unchallenged rulers of the human population. When both of these approaches failed in their latest scheme, they thought they could easily abandon their experiments without any further consequences.  But now that the clones have made such a bold statement to the world, they have put their own organization at risk of being discovered once the world tries to figure out the mysterious origins of the duplicated humans.  One thing is certain though, now with their cloning program and their mind switching programs compromised or defunct, the Knights Templar are certainly going to persist with yet another scheme to obtain the Holy Grail. Only time will tell, and until then, keep theorizing!

Author: Erik Montgomery