Nightmare Fuel / Nope

As a Nightmare Fuel page, all spoilers are unmarked as per wiki policy. You Have Been Warned!

With its unique and surreal take on the genre of UFO-based horror, Nope might be one of Jordan Peele's most bizarre and frightening spectacles.

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Pre-Release

• Both the trailers are an exercise in Nothing Is Scarier in their own respective fields.
  • In the Official Trailer, there is not much explanation of the plot of the movie, and with all the scenes of Surreal Horror, it leaves open the question of what the movie is really about.
  • In the Final Trailer, there is much more insight into the plot: a sibling duo who runs a ranch tries to prove the existence of aliens without getting abducted themselves. Even with the alien invasion story being revealed, it feels like there is much more that hasn't been revealed yet.
• The IMAX movie poster is an Extreme Close-Up of a horse’s eye reflecting the IMAX logo and those mysterious kite strings in the distance.
• The Official Trailer itself is surrounded by Surreal Horror in Peele's style.
  • The trailer starts off fairly lighthearted and upbeat... until the lights in the house fade off as music on a record player screeches to a halt. Cut to outside, and there's a lengthy 9-second sequence of the house... where nothing happens in total silence save for the noise of crickets, until even they are silenced. Eventually, the title card for Jordan Peele floats downwards and cues up a synth drone. It's all quite unnerving.
  • It also hints at some sort of Alien Invasion, all presented as nondescriptly as possible:
    • Jupe unveils a horse locked inside a glass cage, like some kind of offering. And the cloth is pulled by what might be an invisible force (or the cinematography intentionally cuts away from who is pulling it).
    • A line of inflatable tube men all abruptly deflating at once.
    • A display stand filled with plushies of The Greys, an alien mask... and T-shirts promoting an event called the "Star Lasso Experience".
    • A motorcyclist in a mirrored helmet turns to stare at the viewer as he points a camera up at the sky.
    • One character's pink veil is blown upwards while she and others are staring at something in the sky, revealing a horrifically mutilated, lipless face.
    • Someone backs away from an alien starting to emerge from behind a stable wall, with only its scalp and the tops of its eyes visible.
    • A child hiding under a table as some...thing sticks its black, gooey hand under to reach them. And upon closer inspection, the hand almost looks like a mix of a human hand and a horse hoof.
    • A UFO hovers over someone encircled by what looks like a wall of water, and a flash of light makes the combination of the water wall, the open sky, and the UFO look like a giant eye is staring down.
  • At the end of the trailer, Em tries to outrun something, only to be abducted. And unlike most depictions of tractor beams, where there's a bright shaft of light slowly lifting the abductee up, Em gets flung into the sky at high speed by an invisible force.
• While the Final Trailer has a much more comedic and action-oriented tone, don't let that fool you into thinking that there won't be unsettling moments here as well.
  • OJ turns around to see his father fall off his horse, showing no signs of life. The idea that a loved one suddenly drops dead for no reason is heartbreaking and disturbing.
    • Next we see him, he's smiling like nothing's wrong, and he is missing his left eye. It's almost like he didn't know he was in danger.
    • The international trailer has an additional shot of a key stabbed into the back of the horse. This implies that a single key fell from the sky, and impaled his eye...
  • The trailer makes it clear that all the theories about an Alien Invasion story have been proven when the final shot of the trailer shows OJ running away from an old-fashioned and simplistically designed flying saucer.
    • And their tractor beams aren't beams of light, but ones that generate windstorms and can whip you up into the sky with ease. Now what was that name of the main event at Jupiter's Claim again? The 'Star Lasso Experience'?
  • Near the trailer's end, an audience runs away from something, but there is one man that walks towards it with a smile on his face. It's Dissonant Serenity in that small pocket of time.
  • The "they repainted your house" sequence. A shot shows something blocking a rainstorm, but when it cuts to a window, a squelching sound is heard, and a red liquid drips down on the window.
  • The very concept of "I don't think they take you, if you don't look at it." A flying saucer is the ultimate Schmuck Bait. You'd be tempted to look up, right?
    • And that opens a can of Fridge Horror should that be the case. Imagine cloud-gazing, and noticing one cloud looks off. It's a flying saucer, and you'd be abducted before you could fathom what's going on. This is exactly what happens to every guest visiting Jupiter’s Claim when Ricky decides to make a spectacle out of Jean Jacket’s feeding habits.
    • Jupe is encouraging people to watch the spectacle, trying to make money off of a UFO that — at least to his knowledge — abducts only horses. Cue his horrified face when it happens to him and his audience.

The Jupiter's Claim Website

• The website itself feels like an informative website about the park as a whole and even provides fun activities online. But after a certain amount of time, the day shifts to night. Everything about the site then becomes much more ominous.
  • The pictures go from day to night in a fading transition, all while a disturbing synth plays in the background.
  • That little cute animation of Jupe greeting you on the main page? At night, he looks up at the sky, and his smile turns into a look of worry.
  • Many of the descriptions for the park's features and attractions become vaguely threatening. Special mention goes to this one for the bank.
    "It’s the money you spend here to make the experience feel more fun, but do not be fooled. Our currency pushes the lie forward. It precipitates the fears of the unknown. You can spend money here. You can continue this cycle of terror. But know this, you have been warned."
  • In the P.O. Box, all the Jupe images are silhouetted. And the comments change to provide wording that could inspire concern when reading it closely.
    • "I looked deep within the Winkin’ Well this afternoon and saw something I could never forget." — ALKing4Lyfe
    • "My daughter and I rode horses today at Jupiter’s Claim. The horses got scared by the unpredictable weather, but I guess I can’t blame Jupe for that. 3-stars." — RodW23
  • One in particular heavily implies something disturbing happened to Jupe as a child.
  "I met Jupe today and listened to all of his stories about his career as a child actor. I’m going to be honest, it made me feel sad." — MrWilson989
  • And the sunny weather logo? That's replaced with a cloud with a familiar kite string attached to it.
  • All of the photos transition to night without any change. But the Star Lasso Experience? At day, there's a picture of a horse staring into the camera with a row of seats behind it. At night? The horse is gone.
• All of the listed attractions on the website have information on what they're about (even when their descriptions turn vaguely threatening at night).
  • But the Star Lasso Experience? "This page is currently under construction."
  • At day, Jupe is in the hole digging in a cute UNDER CONSTRUCTION picture. At night? He's not there.

Film

• The opening scene. Otis and OJ are working with their horses. In passing, the radio mentions a search for missing hikers. Then they hear screams passing overhead. At that point, various objects start falling out of the sky. One of them is a nickel that hit Otis's right eye and embeds itself deep in his skull. We even see a squirt of blood coming out of his head as OJ tries to drive him to the hospital.
  • A bit of brutal Fridge Horror: that radio report? It says the hikers have been missing for two days. The hikers are still alive, screaming and being digested two days later.
  • Or another terrifying thought is that those might have been victims that weren't declared missing yet. Making you wonder just how often Jean Jacket goes hunting.
• The revelation of Ricky "Jupe" Park's childhood trauma: during his stint as a child actor on a sitcom, he worked alongside Gordy, a chimpanzee that one day went wild and began mauling the cast after getting set off by balloons popping and people staring at him. We see the latter half of this attack play out on screen: when he notices that child actress Mary Jo Elliot is still alive after his assault, he beats her even further while she begs him to stop before tearing at her face with his teeth. Then he spies the actor playing the father and chases him off the set to maul him too. Once he comes back and sits down, now with a face and arms covered in blood, the chimp spots Jupe hiding in terror under the table. By the time Gordy is euthanized, the entire stage is a total bloodbath.
  • Part of what makes the first scene so horrifying is how utterly mundane it is in comparison to the rest of the film, and its relative lack of focus in the previews. A frightened animal attacking innocent people based on pure instinct and fear is an all-too-common occurrence, and definitely not the first thing that people expected to see when they walked into the screenings of this film.
  • The build-up to the massacre is also incredibly unnerving. We watch the human characters running their lines during the sitcom taping. All the while, the audience hears Gordy get more and more agitated offscreen. The audience already knows that Gordy will go berserk from the opening and Jupe's monologue, it's just a matter of when and how it'll happen. And then one of the prop balloons bursts...
  • The human-like hand reaching out in the trailer? It's poor Gordy himself — dripping with blood, frightened and confused at the savage thing he's just done, and trying to reach out to Jupe with the "exploding fistbump" they used to do. Jupe complies, terrified, but just as he tries to "explode" it, Gordy is put down with a shot in the head, as if the kid did it himself. It's unsurprising that Jupe feels an immense amount of trauma and survivor's guilt.
  • Jupe's monologue explaining what happened is a combination of this and Tear Jerker. He's so broken by the event and in denial about his own trauma that he can only process it by gushing about the Saturday Night Live sketch parody of it. Listen to how he describes Chris Kattan's impersonation of Gordy: "He's crushing it, he's killing it onstage", words that could easily apply to what happened to him during the real experience. You even see Jupe become glassy-eyed for a split second.
  • Also combined with Tear Jerker: the character with the mutilated face briefly seen in the trailers? That's Mary Jo Elliot, the former child actress who played Jupe's sister on the show. She did survive the incident, but Gordy basically bit her face off and confined her to a mobility scooter for the past three decades. And then she, like everyone else at Jupiter's Claim, is eaten by Jean Jacket.
  • Worse, you never see any of the deaths. In the film's opening, all you see is bloody corpses littering the set and Gordy covered in blood, having calmed down considerably from the killing. In the next instance, you hear the nauseating crunching sounds of flesh and whatever blunt objects Gordy's using to kill them. The closest you get to seeing anything is Gordy lifting something in the air and smashing a crew member repeatedly with it.
  • Gordy noticing Ricky. He slowly walks over to the table Ricky is hiding under; the fact that he's obscured by cloth does NOT help. Then he stops, and slowly extends his hand towards Ricky. At this point you're just begging for a Jump Scare to happen just to break up the tension. It seems like he's about to kill Ricky... when suddenly, the mother of all Jump Scares happens: rather than what you'd expect, Gordy's brains are splattered all over the cloth, a police officer having shot him.
    • What makes this even worse is that, if the deleted scene reported from the test screenings still applies to the finished film, that wasn't a cop who shot Gordy. A Loony Fan managed to get onto the set with a gun - possibly planning to kill Jupe and/or other cast members - and just happened to arrive right in time to save Jupe's life. How's that for a "bad miracle?"
  • As disturbing as the details of the event are, one of the most unsettling aspects is the fact that the scene of the aftermath is the opening shot of the movie. At this point the audience has no context, no knowledge of what's going on, and is fully expecting the horror to revolve around the UFO plotline; instead, we get a near-silent scene of a blood-soaked chimpanzee wearing human clothes wandering about a TV studio in front of a mostly-offscreen corpse, before it suddenly looks directly at the camera and the scene cuts away to the first scene on the Haywood ranch. It's almost — almost — a relief to get some more context later in the movie.
• Near the beginning, OJ looks across the valley at night and witnesses part of the Star Lasso Experience. All he sees are the lights at Jupiter's Claim dimming, followed by what looks like a dust devil. It's hard to tell what's going on, but it's enough for him to be able to tell that something is off. The only thing we can clearly hear is a horse screaming in terror as it's sucked up into the sky.
• Angel fast-forwards through the recorded footage, and shows that one cloud in the sky hasn't moved at all since the cameras were set up. OJ realizes that the cloud must have been there for the last six months, and he never noticed it despite seeing it every day. It's just so eerie how Jean Jacket is able to hide in plain sight.
• Jean Jacket is a unique spin on the typical flying saucer. It is a flying saucer, but it is not piloted by aliens, nor is it even extraterrestrial in nature. It's an animal. And its tractor beams aren't ones of light, but ones of dust, like a vacuum cleaner. And you'd get abducted if you see it. This happens to Ricky and his audience: they are last seen being trapped in the organism's digestive tract complete with a partially digested horse. It's made worse by the fact that Ricky’s kids were among those eaten, and the screams of children along with the crunching of bones can be heard during the scene.
  • It says something that this film is able to make clouds scary. As mentioned on the main page, lots of horror films rely on darkness and tight claustrophobic places to create their terror, but here? The film will have you dreading open skies and double checking every single cloud. Jean Jacket is large and intimidating, but it's also unsettling fast and can be dead quiet when it wants to be. You could be walking down the street and not even notice it 'til it sucks you up.
  • See that weird metallic tunnel during the opening credits? That's Jean Jacket's eye. Yep. Even before we have any idea what exactly this thing menacing the valley is, the audience actually gets an early peek inside of it as it apparently stares back, while a foreboding piece of Michael Abels' score is heard alongside the sounds of the wind blowing around inside, seeming almost like faint screaming.
  • The audience’s extensive look at the beginning of Jean Jacket’s digestive process is likewise unsettling, with the shrieking guests being squeezed on top of one another in a claustrophobic, bright orange space and covered in unidentifiable, stringy gunk. One woman near the top of the esophagus sees the half-digested horse carcass above her, stripped down to its muscle, and begins screaming even louder, no doubt realizing she and the rest of the abducted individuals have been eaten and will soon be melted down for digestion.
    • In fact, said plastic horse may have been the reason it took so long to digest those people, and finally just shredded and vomited them out just to get it unstuck. The TMZ reporter's screaming inside JJ only seems to last a minute or two, although the hikers it caught were still screaming two days later.
  • Before the massacre unfolds at the Star Lasso Experience, we get an unnerving shot of Jean Jacket just... sitting motionless in the valley, plain as day and not even trying to camouflage itself, to the gradual shock of the audience that thought Jupe was gonna bring out some kind of hokey "aliens" for them. It's at this moment that your gut sinks and you realize something very bad is about to happen to them.
  • As Jupe stares at Jean Jacket descending on the Star Lasso Experience, you can start to see the flailing shadows of folks being sucked up from the crowd, but if you look closely at the background, you can see a boy and girl in the front row dragged from their seats, the girl clawing at the sand desperately before shooting upwards.
  • As we smash-cut inside JJ for the first time, we see the crowd of flailing people in the center of the shot, getting sucked inside JJ's stomach in a "blink and you'll miss it" moment.
  • During the shot where we see the victims inside Jean Jacket, if you listen closely, you can hear the voice of a child calling for their mother.
  • How the scene is described in the screenplay is equally as frightening as actually watching it happen:
    Deeper inside, the 40 park attendees are pushed upwards through a narrow tract. They MOAN, disoriented as they’re pushed by the flat “sheet-like” musculature. Each of the spectacle viewers MANGLED in their own way, piled in a single file line, one above the other. A vertical chain. At the top, a freckled cowgirl can’t go anymore. Lodged in the tract is none other than the decoy horse Emerald stole.
    The force squeezes and the People SCREAM!
  • By the time OJ arrives at Jupiter’s Claim, the park is completely empty. Did the guests who didn’t visit the Star Lasso Experience escape with their lives, or were they eaten too? In a later scene, Angel is shown stealing the car batteries of the abandoned cars near Jupiter's Claim — this implies that most of them, if not all, were eaten.
  • A subtly horrifying detail — presumably hours after the initial attack, Jean Jacket returns to eat Lucky, the horse that Ricky had provided as a sacrifice for the Star Lasso Experience. Some of the guests can still be heard screaming from within the UFO.
    • The screaming continues when Jean Jacket returns to the house, seemingly amplified by the nature of its body. Then we hear a loud crunching sound, and the screaming abruptly stops. On one hand, its victims were finally put out of their misery. On the other, this leads to a waterfall of blood and guts covering the house. OJ and Em never have a chance to clean it off the house, so it just remains there as a grim reminder of what Jean Jacket is capable of for the rest of the film. Plus, there's the fact that we don’t see how the people who get sucked up die. Given how we hear the loud crunch followed by a deluge of blood, it clearly wasn’t pretty.
    • At one point right before the blood is dumped, you can hear a woman scream "I’m burning!"
    • Right after that, and the last words ever uttered by one of the people in Jean Jacket, is this: "Please get us out of here!"
  • Let’s not forget the form Jean Jacket takes in the climax as a threat display. A giant, billowing, cloth-like monster with a square “eye” shifting and shuddering like a snake. It looks like one of the Angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion.
  • The reveal of its threat display is horrifying enough. After Angel narrowly escapes being eaten by wrapping himself in barbed wire, the saucer form starts to unfurl, almost as though it's dying. Then it's shown to be unfolding, and every time it seems to have unveiled its full size, another shot moments later shows it to be even bigger, until finally, it's a borderline Eldritch Abomination towering over the entire valley.
  • Jean Jacket's resemblance to a Biblically accurate angel and some other comments about the alien design paints an extremely horrifying picture that Jean Jacket isn't the only one of its species on Earth, and the species has been around since the BC era.
    "If you think about the way the UFO feeds and the concept of people ascending to heaven, it’s not hard to connect the dots. Jean Jacket might have been with humanity for a long time..."
• Although it turns out to be a prank, Jupe’s children create a truly unsettling atmosphere before the reveal, and may have come away with worse than one of them being punched in the face — not that they deserved their death at the "hands" of Jean Jacket.
• The early camera jumpscare may be especially bad for those suffering entomophobia.
• Angel having to wrap himself in barbed wire to protect himself from being sucked up by Jean Jacket, complete with him gasping in obvious pain as he digs the barbs into his skin.

Post-Release

• Two days after the film came out, Jordan Peele posted the Gordy's Home! sitcom intro on Twitter. While certain elements — such as Ricky hiding under the table, or Ricky and Gordy doing the fistbump — are deliberately Harsher in Hindsight, there's also the fact that, for a sitcom where the main selling feature is a live chimpanzee in suburbia with an astronaut and a physicist, there are very few shots of Gordy, whether on his own or alongside the Houstons. This reflects a reality of performing with chimps: not only are reaction shots with them very difficult to set up, but there have to be as few people near them as possible for safety reasons, not just time constraints. Gordy's handlers were capable of understanding the risks of the birthday scene — the whole family crowded around him, the entire studio audience making eye contact, the potential triggers of the hot lights and the balloons — and yet either they were stupid enough to let it be filmed anyway, or the higher-ups ignored their warnings and forced them to do the birthday scene regardless.
  • The series uses Gowan's "(You're a) Strange Animal" as its theme, but, very tellingly, omits the first verse:
    Well, they say I should approach you with caution
    But not to let you be aware of my fear
    Never know what you'll find
    Don't understand your kind round here

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