This article contains spoilers for “Us.”

In “Us,” a family of uncanny, jumpsuit-clad tunnel dwellers known as “the Tethered” descend upon the home of their well-to-do doppelgängers, the Wilsons. The husband, Gabe, (Winston Duke) offers the intruders his wallet, his car and his A.T.M. pin, though he notes they “ don’t have anything ” of value at the house — it’s their summer lake house, he explains, and they just arrived that day. The Tethered placidly watch him bargain. With their sharp scissors and copycat faces , it’s clear the bedraggled invaders aren’t interested in cash.

The writer-director Jordan Peele’s latest nightmare is part of a long line of home-invasion movies like “The Last House on the Left” and “Straw Dogs” that tap into the fear that home may be where the danger is. When blood spills in a vacation house, however, that dread takes on an extra layer of meaning: Wealth becomes a signifier, leaving the haves vulnerable to opportunistic have-nots. If you are rich enough to use “summer” as a verb, someone will try to murder you.

“Us” brings that class divide directly to the surface. In pitting a hard-working, rich black family against their downtrodden duplicates , Peele makes this tension complicated and explicit. As Gabe’s fruitless offers show, summer homeowners don’t die in horror movies because their killers are out for treasure. They die because their killers are out for them.

But in similar movies like “You’re Next,” the vacation-home invader’s twisted reasoning is often muddled or only hinted at. In this 2011 indie, directed by Adam Wingard and written by Simon Barrett, the Final Girl, Erin ( Sharni Vinson ), faces off against a group of masked invaders in a vacation home belonging to her boyfriend Crispian’s family. His parents are, in her words, “pretty loaded.”