LOS ANGELES — The woman in the black-and-white program on the flat-screen TV was teetering on the brink of madness, delivering a disjointed monologue about parallel worlds and the possibility that our own physical duplicates might walk among us. As the camera hovered above her troubled face and the decades-old audio crackled with the sound of a persistent rainstorm, Jordan Peele sat captivated on a nearby couch. “Beautiful shot,” he said with quiet awe.

Here in his personal office, Peele, the celebrated comedian turned Academy Award-winning horror filmmaker, was watching an old episode of “The Twilight Zone,” the classic science-fiction anthology series that he is helping to revive.

On a recent March morning, Peele had, with some calculation, chosen a 1960 installment called “Mirror Image,” from the show’s debut season. It stars Vera Miles (“Psycho”) as a woman convinced she is being followed by her exact double, and Martin Milner (“Route 66”) as the man who doesn’t believe her until it is too late.

Peele has pointed to “Mirror Image” as an inspiration for his new film, “Us,” in which Lupita Nyong’o and her family are besieged by murderous doppelgängers. He also admires the episode, written by the “Twilight Zone” creator Rod Serling, for its ability to elicit jump-scares without relying on supernatural beasts or extraterrestrial beings. In his favorite tales of terror, Peele told me, “I love human beings as the monster, as the horror.”