Us Composer Michael Abels Talks How 'I Got 5 On It' Shaped The End Of The Movie

Jordan Peele's Us is more tension than horror. The box office-hit follows Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) and her family’s terrifying journey because the four come face to face with their doppelgängers — known because the “tethered” in the film. There’s the imposing copy of father Gabe (Winston Duke), all brute force and flared nostrils; a teenage look-alike of daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), her head slightly bowed with a full, unnerving smile on her face; a snarling, growling feral version of son Jason (Evan Alex), rarely seen without a mask; and Adelaide's wide-eyed, gruff-voiced other. These four are cunning, silent, and, it seems, much stronger than their upper-middle class counterparts. Because the film’s plot races towards answers for why they exist, the tension repeatedly rises and falls.


The film’s startling soundtrack, helmed by veteran composer Michael Abels, acts as a storyteller in its own right, imbuing each scene with a unsettling feeling that lingers up until the very end. Abels handled the “gospel horror” of Get Out soon after Peele discovered him on YouTube. And the success of Get Out carved out a special space for him in the movie industry and Peele’s inner circle. “He has given me a full chance to express my creativity within his vision so as soon as that I get to work with him, it has been blessed territory,” the composer tells MTV News over the phone.


MTV News talked to Abels about the sounds of Us, the decision to use “I Got 5 On It,” and what would he do to his own doppelgänger.


MTV News: How did your approach to composing music for Us differ from Get Out? I read that for Get Out, Jordan Peele supplied you with a script so you created music based on that.


Abels: Jordan likes to hear music in pre-production, before he’s even shot any film, because it cooperates with the him to design the sonic world of the film along with because the visual world. The distinction here's that it was a different story and the music has to calculate with the characters in this film and tell their story. He wanted me to experiment with duality in music, just because duality is an overarching theme in the film itself. Instruments that normally don’t go with each other. There’s a solo violin, yet there’s also a cimbalom (a sort of musical instrument that looks like a piano yet is played with hammers). There’s a track where a kalimba, berimbau, and didgeridoo are playing with each other and so they are all from different cultures, so there was a lot of trial and error with customary and nontraditional sounds specifically to come up with the sonic palette for Us.


MTV News: The cimbalom became Umbrae's (Zora's doppelgänger) defining sound. Did you find have other instruments to serve as opposites for other cast members?


Abels: Not as specifically as that one because it seems like there really are decisions that happen as a result of working on the film and it’s not like I mentioned, “OK, I have these four characters and this is her musical instrument, this his instrument…,” and thus forth. I might begin out that way, nevertheless and then the film evolves and different scenes need different sorts of music and that could be also restricting. The cimbalom seemed to work really well in the scenes with Umbrae and her smiling mischief.


Another thing is that there’s a solo violin and that happens a lot over Red, which is Adelaide's doppelgänger, and the violin somehow had a very good way of expressing Red’s quest for justice. So there’s a menacing malevolence to her, however there’s also a freedom of spirit that she has. The violin was very good at balancing those two feelings.


MTV News: What do the tethered resemble to you? How did you look to resemble this in the music?


Abels: Jordan doesn’t give people a specific example of what the tethered resemble because he wants audience have the ability to participate in the method of deciding what metaphors resonate best with them about the film. The tethered are people who don’t have possibilities in their lives. They are restricted in their ability to function as completely independent individuals and have access to things that we have that we take for granted. If that reminds you of anyone, whether its a crowd in society or yourself, that’s categorize kind of the idea that’s in the realm of what this film is talking about. I think anyone can indicate, in their own lives, times where they haven’t been free to express themselves or haven’t had the possibilities that others have had.


One of the wonderful things about the film is that because you could can indicate with the characters on some level, not only are you terrified of those in one sense, you could empathize with them on another. That's one of the cute dualities in us, one of the several dualities that present. There really are times that the music empathizes with them and isn't terrifying however, case in point, lonely and isolated. Particularly, the track called “Human,” where you’re in the underpass so you visualize their world. There’s some empty low sounds of wind whistling through an empty cavern, sounds we call "ambiance," that are musical although are in the background building a sort of sonic environment. Then there voices. There really are a lot of voices in the score and at that point, they aren’t even saying words, they are just sort of moaning in a very anguished and lonely way. All these things are designed to make the feelings that the tethered have and how they act the way to do.


MTV News: Where did the inspiration come from for "Anthem"?


Abels: It came from my original conversation with Jordan about the kind of music that he wanted to hear in the film. He decides this idea of duality, and the second thing that he mentioned to me was that he wanted to begin the film with children’s voices. In his films, one of the things that he’s really known for is taking something that you think of in one context – generally, that context being very sweet innocent or happy — and recasting it with images that cause you to look at in an entirely different way. So with children’s voices, we would think of those as being very sweet and innocent, so he wanted me to begin with that and show people that children’s voices can be very scary and disturbing.


The thing that you've got to get from “Anthem,” as a crowd, is that there really are an audience of people and so they are organized, so the tune is categorize kind of like a battle cry. You hear this very march-like, militaristic music so you could tell that this categorize of people have an evil intent even in the event you can’t understand what they are saying. However then, also it’s critical for this battle cry to not sound like it's coming from some culture other than our own. So rather than a militaristic Western march, the beat drops and it's really funky and goes against the voices, not with it. It’s made up of drums from a bunch of different cultures and that was my way of letting people know that this is a march for people all of the people.


MTV News: Who would you mention are the villains of the film – the human beings or the tethered?


Abels: That’s the complete nature of the film: The tethered are human, and that’s the most crucial thing to understand about them. They are not aliens. They are us. The film makes it unclear how much they are separate from us and why much they are literally a piece of who we are. You’re meant to come away asking that question. To me, I think response The solution is clearly both.


MTV News: If put in the same situation as Adelaide, would you kill your doppelgänger or let them live? Why?


Abels: That’s such a fantastic question. Well, one thing about Jordan’s storytelling, and something I think is crucial to his brand, is that his characters act as any regular person would do in incredible situations. As an example, they call the police at the starting and not at the end. And so they mention humorous things, very darkly humorous things in upsetting situations because that’s what people do. Humor is key for us have the ability to nickname stressful situations. The reason I bring that up is because would I kill my doppelgänger? I sure wouldn’t aspire to, however if my double was going to kill my children, I think response The answer is that I would.


MTV News: How different do you know the film’s energy would have been if as a substitute opposed to the horrified rendition of “I Got 5 On It,” playing in the background of the showdown between Adelaide and Red, the original song, "Pas de Deux" from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, was played?


Abels: It would have been different, that’s for sure. How different though, I couldn’t tell you. The phrase “Pas de Deux,” it comes from classical ballet. It’s a name given to a scene in a ballet that features the prima ballerina and the head male dancer thus and they do a duet. The rough translation of “Pas de Deux" is “duet." The original intention from the script was that the scene could be underscored by "Pas de Deux" from The Nutcracker. There’s a long version of that scene that is scored that way. The idea was that we would use that music, or I was going to prepare a horror version of that, and it also was an exhilarating challenge that I was looking forward to, yet it was clear to Jordan, after the answer of the trailer, what needed to be done.


He’s a visionary with his own ideas, nevertheless he also responds to feedback. I think that comes from his improv comedy background where so much of what people who improvise do is in response to where the audience is allowing them to go creatively. It was clear to him that there had to be some payoff for the answer that people were having. So we determined to use “5 On It” as this thing that got twisted for final battle alternatively opposed to Tchaikovsky, and I think it was a very fantastic choice.