Nope (2022) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 29

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How about a big nope sandwich with extra nope sauce?

Jordan Peele creates a hat trick with the release of Nope, his third film in the horror genre. Yes, it’s freaky. Yes, it’s about aliens. And big monsters. But it also is, yet again, a film of his that talks about modern American culture. It presents an emphatic look at the nature of spectacles and our fascination with them while still scaring the pants off you!

Before Viewing

There’s not much to go on in this trailer, other than it’s a Jordan Peele film. That may be enough. A black woman talks about the first moving image being her great great great grandfather while standing by a horse on a film set. Later a black man is seen with a horse outside at night when the power goes out. Something spooks the horse and chases the man. There are a number of other reaction shots of something going on, but with little to no context: some inflatable tube men power down, an audience at a rodeo looks into the sky, and a woman wearing a veil appears to be missing part of her face. Yes, there’s a whole lot of Nope in this film.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

Otis Jr “OJ” (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) are a pair of horse trainers carrying on their father’s business of Haywood Hollywood Horses six months after he died from being hit by a nickel falling out of the sky. On a soundstage for a commercial, their horse Lucky gets spooked and nearly kicks one of the filmmakers. OJ decides to sell this horse to the neighboring property in Agua Dulce, California–a western amusement park called Jupiter’s Claim. The owner, Ricky “Jupe” Park, was a child actor in the movie Kid Sheriff and the television series Gordy’s Home. While meeting with Jupe, he relates the story of an incident where a chimpanzee lashed out on his film set, nearly killing several cast members.

OJ discusses selling the ranch with Emerald, who thinks that would be a bad idea. She reminds him about how Otis Sr (Keith David) changed the industry with their horses. That evening Ghost, another of the horses, is in the training arena at the ranch and takes off when a UFO flies overhead. Emerald realizes that if they could get footage of the alien craft, they could make “Oprah” money. They visit a local electronic store to purchase a security camera system and hire Angel (Brandon Perea), their cashier, to install it. The Haywoods are cagey about what they need the cameras for, but when they ask Angel to point them straight up he realizes what they are up to. Jupe stops by to invite them to his new family live show.

After sundown, OJ notices the lights on in the barn. As he investigates he is shocked to see humanoid aliens prowling around, so he begins filming them on his phone. They turn out to be Jupe’s three boys playing a practical joke on him. On his way back to the house, a horse decoy they set up gets sucked into the air by a vortex, along with their horse Clover. OJ believes there’s something in the cloud above the ranch. A praying mantis on the lens of the camera prevented them from capturing anything on film. Emerald calls up cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) to help them get the perfect shot. Angel returns, having reviewed their security footage remotely, and identifies a single cloud above the hills that never seems to move.

A flashback to the “Gordy Incident” from 1998 shows what happened on the soundstage. During the filming of a season two episode, “Gordy’s Birthday,” a balloon pops against the hot lights, and the chimpanzee playing Gordy snaps. He begins attacking the cast, beating teen actress Mary Jo Elliott (Sophia Coto) savagely, while young Jupe (Jacob Kim) watches from his hiding place under the dining room table. Gordy sees Jupe hiding and comes to investigate. He reaches his bloody paw out to fist-bump Jupe (a character trait for the characters on the show). Jupe puts his fist out, but before they touch, Gordy is shot in the head and killed.

At Jupiter’s Claim, Jupe introduces a small audience to his Star Lasso Experience, at their outdoor arena location. Lucky, the horse, is in a cage in the center, and Jupe explains they are all about to witness a spectacle. The power goes out and a giant circular creature, looking like a traditional UFO with a round opening in the underside, flies above them and sucks all the people up into its mouth. OJ arrives later and is able to avoid being eaten, recognizing he should not look directly at the beast. The creature takes up residence above the Haywood farmhouse during a rainstorm and “poops” out all the inorganic matter, plus a bunch of blood, all over the house. OJ nicknames the creature Jean Jacket, after a horse that he got to train as a young boy.

Antlers arrives with a hand-wound camera and the group comes up with a plan to flush Jean Jacket out and film it. They set up a series of sky dancer puppets around the property to detect the power-draining aura the creature emits. OJ gets the monster to chase him on a horse by wearing a pair of fake eyes on the back of his hoodie. Antlers ascends a nearby hill to get a better shot at magic hour and is sucked up into Jean Jacket. Emerald takes off on a motorcycle towards Jupiter’s Claim, getting Jean Jacket to follow her instead of attacking OJ. She launches the Kid Sheriff balloon from the park, which attracts Jean Jacket. It morphs from the saucer shape into a scary winged beast with a boxy mouth and eats the person-shaped balloon. At that moment Emerald uses the Winking Well camera to get a photo of the alien, just before it pops. Reporters show up wondering what is going on as OJ arrives on Lucky. The camera spits out the picture, finally giving Emerald the proof she desired.

“And it was six minutes and 13 seconds of havoc. Network tried to bury it, but it was a spectacle. People are just obsessed.” – Ricky ‘Jupe’ Park

Jordan Peele’s third film, Nope, was released two years after his previous film, Us. And like that film, and his first–Get Out–it’s another bending of genre styles and expectations. Having explored race relations, privilege, and xenophobia, Peele turned his attention to exploring the nature of spectacle, and animal exploitation. Instead of dealing with terrestrial horror, he leaned into the realm of science-fiction with an alien creature that has chosen to snack on Southern Californians. Peele makes clever use of the title as a word used by people when seeing a scary situation or a situation that would create too much drama. Someone might say “nope,” as in, they do not want to get involved in whatever may be happening, just like OJ says in the barn when investigating what he believes are aliens. Nope reunited Peele with his Get Out star, Daniel Kaluuya. This time Kaluuya isn’t as abused as he was in Get Out, playing a character that is more certain of his destiny. A few of the other main cast have backgrounds in the horror genre. Keith David is known for his work in The Thing, They Live, and Pitch Black plus many others. Keke Palmer had recurring roles in both Scream Queens and Scream: The TV Series. Michael Wincott worked on several horror films such as Curtains, The Crow, and Alien Resurrection. And finally, Steven Yeun is best known for his role as Glenn on The Walking Dead.

Nope’s main theme is about spectacles, which is a term mentioned exclusively by Jupe in the film. The term spectacle can be defined as “a visually striking performance or display,” but also “an event or scene regarded in terms of its visual impact.” Both are accurate in terms of the events in Nope. The film itself is a spectacle, creating a piece of entertainment that has both a striking performance and visual impact. Jean Jacket’s various shapes will stick in your brain for a long time, just as Gordy’s temper tantrum will. But the events surrounding Jupe and his life in Hollywood are also spectacular. He describes the 1998 Gordy incident as a “spectacle,” in much the same way he describes the appearance of Jean Jacket, as an “absolute spectacle.” In his mind, it’s an event that draws a crowd and makes people talk. It’s responsible for his celebrity as he continues to make a living off his trauma, and others. Peele intimates through the film, with Jupe’s character primarily, that there are some people who are unable to discern good things from bad things. They only notice that people are looking, but not the way in which they look. Jupe sees people interested in him, primarily fascinated with his story of survival on the set of Gordy’s Home. But he can’t discern that it’s a morbid curiosity, rather than something more positive. OJ, at one point, even wonders if there are things such as bad miracles, like the event that took the life of his father. It was a tragic and odd shower of strange metal objects from the sky that ended the life of Otis, Sr. A miracle of sorts, but one that turned dark.

Attached to all the spectacles in the film are animals: a chimpanzee, horses, and flying alien clouds. For OJ, who makes his living as a horse trainer and wrangler, he understands the dangers of dealing with wild animals. When speaking about Jupe, OJ says, “He got caught up trying to tame a predator. You can’t do that. You got to enter an agreement with one.” Horses are certainly not considered predators, but they are also animals that can harm or kill humans. In the opening scenes, Lucky is spooked by a mirrored visual effects ball and kicks backward, nearly hitting several of the people on set. OJ has created a rapport with Lucky knowing what sets him off. He also understands animals more than someone like Jupe does. Jupe survived the Gordy incident unscathed (at least physically) because he was lucky. He never actually made eye contact with the chimpanzee, which for many animals is an aggressive movement. The tablecloth prevented Gordy from seeing Jupe look at him just before the police shot the animal. Unfortunately, he was not as lucky with Jean Jacket. OJ recognizes that Jean Jacket is an animal, and a predator, and prevents himself from looking into its eyes–presumably somewhere on its underbelly. He is then able to use his knowledge as a trainer, and some assumptions about the creature’s behavior, to figure out a way to try to photograph it. But it’s his sister who is able to deduce a plan to kill Jean Jacket.

Nope also focuses on the idea of celebrity and Hollywood. Emerald works with OJ at Haywood Hollywood Horses, but has–what he calls–several side hustles. She corrects him that Haywood Hollywood Horses is her side hustle. She is always looking for the next big thing or some get-rich scheme, which is why she grabs onto the idea of getting a photo of the alien and selling it. When Antlers gets wind of her idea, he tells her, “This dream you’re chasing, where you end up at the top of the mountain, all eyes on you…it’s the dream you never wake up from.” Basically, he’s telling her that it’s a dream you will always be chasing because there is no top to the hill. Ironically, he is killed running up a hill to get a shot of Jean Jacket at magic hour–attempting to satisfy his perfect shot. But this dream of celebrity is what also enthralls Jupe. He too is looking for the next big thing. Attempting to create a new show at his floundering theme park.

The horror of Nope is scary. In many ways, it’s Jaws in the sky. The scenes of Gordy beating on the limp body of Mary Jo are unsettling. Jean Jacket racing out of the sky after OJ is shocking. But out of all the strange and unprovoked animal attacks, the scariest thing is the lack of explanations. Things happen that are terrible, and often people don’t understand why. They just happen. Personally, a spine-tingling moment occurs in the horse barn where OJ thinks he sees aliens. Peele’s camera holds onto a shadow that continues to move closer and closer. The viewer feels exposed in this scene as they attempt to peer into the shadow, or like OJ, say “nope.” Out of all of Peele’s films, Nope may be the one that feels the least scary–even after everything said above. There’s still nothing like Get Out for the sheer visceral horror of humans being terrible to humans. But Nope says a number of pertinent things about American culture and its unhealthy relationship with spectacles, which makes it a worthwhile film to rewatch.

Assorted Musings

• The final sequence of the film has OJ wearing the color orange (as in orange juice), while Emerald is dressed in an emerald green.
• When OJ mentions making an agreement with dangerous animals, Antlers mentions magicians Sigfried and Roy. The duo was famous for using a white tiger in their act, until one performance in 2003 when the tiger attacked Roy, biting him in the throat and dragging him offstage.
• Fry’s Electronics was a Southern California chain that created different themes for their store, like a Polynesian theme in ​​Manhattan Beach, or the 1950s UFO/Sci-Fi theme at their Burbank store–as seen in the film.