The plot of Jordan Peele’s wonderful horror movie Us comes from folklore

I just finished a book called The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge’s Luis Borges and came across the overarching plot of the movie Us.

[…] in the preliminary outline [originally recorded in France in 1736 based on a French oral tradition, Father Fontecchio of the Society of Jesus] noted that the Fish was a shifting and shining creature that nobody had ever caught but that many said they had glimpsed in the depths of mirrors.[…]

In those days the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, as they are now, cut off from each other. They were, besides, quite different; neither beings nor colours nor shapes were the same. Both kingdoms, the specular and the human, lived in harmony; you could come and go through mirrors.

One night the mirror people invaded the earth. Their power was great, but at the end of bloody warfare the magic arts of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. He repulsed the invaders, imprisoned them in their mirrors, and forced on them the task of repeating, as though in a kind of dream, all the actions of men. He stripped them of their power and of their forms and reduced them to mere slavish reflections. Nonetheless, a day will come when the magic spell will be shaken off.

The first to awaken will be the Fish. Deep in the mirror we will perceive a very faint line and the colour of this line will be like no other colour. Later on, other shapes will begin to stir. Little by little they will differ from us; little by little they will not imitate us. They will break through the bar- riers of glass or metal and this time will not be defeated. Side by side with these mirror creatures, the creatures of water will join the battle.

The concept of “doubles” or “doppelgängers” (German for double-walker) also has its own entry in Borges book. These (often) bad omens are seen in various cultures throughout history. For example, in ancient Egypt it was known as the “ka” and in the Talmud it:

tells the story of a man who, in search of God, met himself.

I thought this was quite an poetic line derived from a religious text that elucidating Hebrew Bible. In my mind this quote aligns with the secular belief that God was invented in man’s image, not the other way around. However, I am sure there are many ways to interpret this through a theistic lens. For example, as a warning to be careful not to let one’s ego or self-projection result in misinterpretation of God’s meaning.

Another example is ”The Double,” a novella by Dostoyevsky along with its 2013 film starring Jesse Eisenberg. The quite eerie plot hinges on a doppelgänger taking over a man’s role at work. It gave me the same feeling as when I look at brutalist Soviet architecture.

Coming across these entries in the book recently seemed like one of life’s little synchronicities. Just a couple of days ago this brief documentary about scientists in Britain studying people who meet their own purportedly unrelated doubles in the wild autoplayed. youtu.be/xBw2VFsRXao

———-

As far as Borges’ sources are concerned, it is perhaps worth noting that he tended to be a bit fast and loose with citations.

For example, another story in this compilation called A Bao A Qu changed its citation completely with the English translation (it was originally published in Spanish). The fable is of an aura-like creature that lives at the footsteps of the stairway to the Tower of Victory in Malaysia and

when someone starts up the spiralling stairs is the A Bao A Qu brought to consciousness, and then it sticks close to the visitor’s heels, keeping to the outside of the turn- ing steps, where they are most worn by the generations of pilgrims.

The updated citation to a perhaps imaginary book called On Malay Witchcraft (1937) may have been to added to sound more “exotic” to an English speaking audience.

Regardless, Borges book came out in 1957. So if the written story in Us of the mirror people did not go so far back as the 1700s (or before), it was certainly published before Peele’s movie. It’s a fascinating fable so question remains: was Peele inspired by Borges directly? Or something else?