Nope, the latest release from one of the most significant horror directors of this century, Jordan Peele, just recently became his third straight movie (out of three, mind you) to cross $100 million at the global box office, which is all the more remarkable when you consider that each of these films are R-rated. The level of anticipation around any upcoming release from Peele is borderline Tarantino-esque these days, and given the subversive quality of his work, it’s easy to see why. As much of a draw as Peele’s name is to the box office, however, the (ongoing) success of Nope is also a testament to its brilliant marketing campaign.
Speculation was rife during production, with much of the rumours claiming that Peele was making a “UFO movie,” though for anybody who knows anything about his work rightfully figured that it just can’t be that simple. Yet the eventual trailers played right into it being a straight-up science-fiction horror about aliens, which only drove the masses into further wild speculation, to the point that they were even theorising the film’s title to be an acronym for Not of Planet Earth (it’s not). One trailer even boldly shows a wide shot of lead actor Daniel Kaluuya running on horseback from what appears to be an alien ship, which is in full display behind him. A lot of movies like this hint at the monster that will be plaguing their characters, eventually delivering said monster with few surprises apart from their overall design. That’s not to say that there is anything necessarily wrong with this approach. There have been countless brilliant entries in the monster movie genre that have used this approach to marketing ever since Steven Spielberg’s Jaws made it cool…while also forever changing the blockbuster landscape.
In this particular piece of marketing (which was shown late in the campaign), Peele literally waves his monster right in front of audiences, but because of his brilliantly Spielbergian approach to the movie’s otherworldly sci-fi element, we all accept it as a ship because that is what cinema and indeed history has trained us to do. Why else would we assume the creature’s intentionally saucer-like design was anything other than a ship? While we understand this is Jordan Peele and nothing should ever be taken for granted, we nonetheless find ourselves buying into the flying saucer element, believing the inevitable twist would come elsewhere.
Then, Kaluuya’s character eventually questions both his and the audience’s perceptions up to this point in the movie, ruminating if this object is even a ship to begin with, the meaning of which takes a moment to sink in. However, Peele, the narrative genius that he is, doesn’t rest on his laurels here, immediately segueing into the horrifying massacre at the Juniper’s Claim showground, which, once the realisation sets in that the supposed ship is in fact a living predator, makes for one of the most viscerally disturbing scenes in recent years. And in case the audience didn’t know, the shot inside the creature where it is literally swallowing its victims emphasises the grotesque reality of the situation.
The marketing, and of course the movie itself, is genius in its simplicity. Nope takes our pop cultural and societal notions of UFOs (especially after some of the confirmed US military encounters in recent years) and flips it in a manner that is at once thrilling and refreshing. This twist occurs at the film’s midway point, but by no means does it lose any steam from there. In fact, its second half is more focused than the first, ramping up the stakes in many aspects while also dealing more directly with its themes of the nature of living things and cinema, which were largely expressed by the somewhat tenuous Gordy’s Home plot thread early on. The cinema aspect is particularly interesting, with the creature’s final form evoking a camera-like aesthetic (you know what I mean if you saw it), in addition to the satirically devoted artiste and cinematographer Antlers Holst, played by Toronto actor Michael Wincott, who aids in capturing the creature on camera.
This is all to say that Nope turned out to be a different movie from what we had expected, and for the better. There are fleeting glimpses of alien-like elements in the trailer, such as Juniper’s sons parading as extra-terrestrials in OJ’s barn and Gordy’s bloody hand reaching out to a young Juniper, but each of these instances omitted vital context at the time, leading us to think, along with all the other evidence, “Well, what else could it be?”
If handled wrong, a twist of his magnitude could have come off as farcical, leaving audiences only to mourn its wasted potential, but with Jordan Peele at the helm it is instead an enthrallingly clever shakeup of how we perceive UFOs in cinema. This is something the marketing team were keenly aware of as they manufactured a campaign that doubled down on conventional extra-terrestrial elements to eschew Peele’s true vision until it was released, making for a largely unadulterated experience that is all too rare in a time where studios have become exceedingly concerned with leaving little to the imagination in their trailers.