For this year’s 31 Nights of Horror Challenge, the Night 4 prompt is Jordan Peele. We watched the movie, Nope (2022) Amazon Prime.

Storyline

The residents of a lonely gulch in inland California bear witness to an uncanny and chilling phenomenon.

After random objects falling from the sky result in the death of their father, ranch-owning siblings OJ and Emerald Haywood attempt to capture video evidence of an unidentified flying object with the help of tech salesman Angel Torres and documentarian Antlers Holst.

Our Thoughts on Nope (2022)

Jordan Peele is one of my favorite directors in the ‘new era of horror.’ He is a great storyteller and has an eye for subtble nods to pop culture.

Classy, complete, talented, polished, professional, funny, cerebral, and just plain GOOD!

Mr. Peele has a professionalism and class about his work that makes them shine. From casting to writing to directing he just knows how to do it without insulting bad comedy or tasteless dialog. He just makes it all work so well in his films that they feel complete and contained.

NOPE is no different. A strange and humourous blend of characters start investigating some strangeness and end up way out of their league. Only to discover.

7 out of 10 stars

Trivia 

The very early clip of a jockey riding a horse, which Emerald claims features her and OJ’s ancestor, is a real 1878 animated series of photographs, one of the first moving images ever, which has come to be called Sallie Gardner at a Gallop (1878). Sallie Gardner is the name of the horse; the two jockeys were listed as being named “C. Marvin” and “G. Domm.” Neither of their identities are known, though they very well could have been black as Emerald claims. In those days many jockeys were black, such as thirteen of the fifteen jockeys racing at the first Kentucky Derby in 1875.

Despite being featured prominently, Fry’s Electronics closed all of its locations on February 24, 2021, prior to the film’s production. The film shot in the Burbank, California location and recreated the interior.

Jordan Peele cites King Kong (1933), Jurassic Park (1993), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Signs (2002), and The Wizard of Oz (1939) as influences on the film. He considers these films as examples of addiction to spectacle, a major theme in the film.

Steven Yeun‘s character Jupe has a large pair of metal scissors on his desk which are the same scissors prominently featured in Jordan Peele‘s previous film Us (2019).

When OJ and Emerald are being retold of the 1998 incident where a chimpanzee actor of a well-loved sitcom brutally attacked and killed two of its costars, OJ says that incident is part of the reason animal trainers are forbidden to train with chimpanzees nowadays. He is likely referring to various other incidents regarding chimpanzee attacks on humans, particularly the incident in 2009 involving another chimpanzee actor named Travis, who mauled and disfigured a friend of his owner’s before being shot to death by police.