‘Us’ Too: 11 Great Movies About Doppelgangers
‘Us’ Too: 10 Movies About Doppelgangers
“Us,” Jordan Peele’s highly-anticipated follow up to “Get Out,” arrives in theaters this week carrying enormous expectations for horror fans, even as the filmmaker hopes to showcase his imagination and versatility. The story of a family that returns from vacation only to encounter its opposite -- a group of doppelgangers who are eager to replace them - Peele’s latest looks at the impulses and desires that drive us on a daily basis. As the film frightens audiences nationwide this weekend, we assembled a list of 10 other films where the characters become their own worst enemies - sometimes literally.
‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ (1956)
Don Siegel’s 1956 horror film has become one of Hollywood’s most enduring tales and served to examine different metaphors in each of the eras in which its remakes were produced. Kevin McCarthy brings a feverish intensity to his role as a doctor who slowly discovers a conspiracy to replace humankind with emotionless pod people.
‘Vertigo’ (1958)
Widely regarded as one of Hitchcock’s best, this thriller follows an acrophobic investigator who becomes obsessed with a young woman he’s hired to follow. Kim Novak plays multiple versions of the same woman -- one real, one fake -- as she and Jimmy Stewart find themselves helpless to recreate events that end in tragedy.
‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ (1978)
Phillip Kaufman directed this 1978 remake of Don Siegel’s film, widely considered the best version ever put on screen. Skillfully avoiding the camp of its predecessor, the film boasts incredible performances from Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams and Leonard Nimoy.
‘The Thing’ (1982)
John Carpenter’s remake of “The Thing From Another World” was critically reviled upon its release but has since gone on to become one of the most celebrated films of his career. Carpenter expertly plays a shell game with the audience with his story of a remote outpost whose inhabitants discover has been infiltrated by an extraterrestrial with the ability to transform into anyone or any...thing.
‘Superman III’ (1983)
Richard Lester directed this third installment in the “Superman” series, where the last son of Krypton first encounters a computer hacker played by Richard Pryor, then his evil twin, who eventually splits apart from the hero for a classic battle in a junkyard.
'The Puppet Masters' (1994)
This weirdly overlooked mid-90s gem (not to be confused with the similarly titled horror movie series about murderous dolls) finds Donald Sutherland leading a team of CIA agents and specialists investigating a UFO that has landed in rural Iowa. This, of course, leads to the discovery of a slug-like alien species that attaches itself to people’s backs and controls them, turning them into puppets, if you will. This is a low budget charmer, with a crackling good script by Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio and David Goyer; one of the less thoughtful entries on the list but one of the most go-for-broke entertaining.
‘Lost Highway’ (1997)
Like with so many of David Lynch’s films, it’s hard to say definitively who’s who in this 1997 film about a musician who gets sentenced to death for the murder of his girlfriend. But Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty play opposite sides of the same coin as Lynch’s mischievous creativity unleashes a nightmarish sequence of events that neither wants to be part of.
‘The Prestige’ (2006)
Christopher Nolan demystified stage magic in this 2006 drama about competing artists (Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman) who go to extreme lengths to deceive their audiences with increasingly elaborate tricks. On top of the film’s sci-fi elements -- don’t look in the basement of Angier’s theatre! -- Nolan repeatedly uses doubles both as a narrative device and an over-arching theme as he explores these two (…?) men’s commitment to their art.
‘Black Swan’ (2010)
Darren Aronofsky directed this dark thriller about a young, ambitious ballerina who finds herself being stalked by a mysterious doppelganger after earning the lead role in a new ballet. Again, duality is a central theme in the story, but Aronofsky manages to throw in some truly disturbing little details that make the main character’s descent into madness a terrifying mystery and not just an inevitable implosion.
‘The Double’ (2014)
Richard Ayoade continues to have a wonderful low-key career as a director thanks to films like this 2014 film about a young man who finds himself usurped by his doppelganger. Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska star in this unique, wry film that explores the choices not made and hypothesizes how life would be different if an exact replica came into the picture.
‘Enemy’ (2014)
Denis Villenueve was still on the cusp of his own mainstream breakthrough when he directed this odd little thriller about a college professor (Jake Gyllenhaal) who discovers a lookalike in a movie he’s watching and becomes obsessed with finding out about him and his life. There’s tons of nightmarish imagery -- including some really, really creepy spiders -- but it’s the way that the main character’s life gets absorbed and forgotten into his doppelganger’s that truly gets under your skin.
