Jordan Peele Releases His Latest Horror ‘Nope’

For fans of the Peeleverse, the impending film Nope is a movie we are all waiting for with bated breath. Before the full trailer premieres this Superbowl Sunday, you can catch a quick first look of photo stills from the movie. 

Peele’s third horror movie is currently titled Nope, and it’s been described as “a new terror from the mind of Academy Award winner Jordan Peele.” Peele of course won that Oscar for the aforementioned Get Out, taking home the Best Original Screenplay trophy at the 2018 Academy Awards. Peele’s debut movie was even nominated for Best Picture, a rare accomplishment for horror.

Both written and directed by Peele, Nope is shrouded in secrecy at this point in time, but we do have a cast and a piece of early promotional poster art to whet our appetites…

Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out) will be streaming with Peele on the mysterious movie, with the cast also including Steven Yeun (“The Walking Dead,” Mayhem) and Keke Palmer (“Scream”). Michael Wincott (The Crow), Barbie Ferreira and Brandon Perea also star.

Universal currently has Peele’s new film set for July 22, 2022, which means that we should probably be expecting a trailer within the next couple months. The first trailer for Us, as a little bit of context here, was released online just under three months before the film’s release, so a similar timeframe would bring the Nope trailer online around April. Then again, with the ongoing pandemic again throwing a wrench in all theatrical plans as the Omicron variant brings the numbers back up to worrying highs, the film could certainly be shifted out of summer.

For now, however, Nope is still very much scheduled for Summer 2022, currently set for a theatrical only release. Of note, “select sequences” were filmed in 65mm with IMAX cameras.

Nope is part of a “five-year exclusive production partnership” Universal Pictures inked with Peele and his company Monkeypaw Productions, and it’s been described as a “horror event.” Mind you, anything from Peele at this point is instantly an event, but we can probably expect Nope to be Peele’s biggest movie to date, what with the announced IMAX optimization and all. On that note, the film’s cinematographer is Hoyte van Hoytema, whose previous work includes Let the Right One In, Spectre, and the Christopher Nolan films Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Tenet.

So what exactly is Nope about? That’s where the trail on this one runs cold.

All we really have to go on is the film’s aforementioned poster, found below. This poster, shared by Peele last July, is to date the only official marketing we’ve gotten for the movie, providing us with a teaser shot of what looks to be a secluded town or village at the base of a mountain, with an ominous cloud looming overhead. From within that cloud hangs a string of pendants, making the cloud look like a massive balloon that’s hanging over the town.

“This is pure wild speculation here, but the focal point is obviously the cloud/kite string thing,” Bloody Disgusting’s head critic Meagan Navarro mused in a chat we were recently having on Slack. “Which made me think of the whole kite experiment and conducting electricity or lightning. And the town below being on the receiving end of that electricity.”

As Wikipedia explains, “The kite experiment is a scientific experiment in which a kite with a pointed, conductive wire attached to its apex is flown near thunder clouds to collect electricity from the air and conduct it down the wet kite string to the ground. It was proposed and may have been conducted by Benjamin Franklin with the assistance of his son William Franklin. The experiment’s purpose was to uncover the unknown facts about the nature of lightning and electricity, and with further experiments on the ground, to demonstrate that lightning and electricity were the result of the same phenomenon.”

When this poster first surfaced, I personally viewed the lit up town as some kind of carnival, which reminded me of Ray Bradbury’s classic Halloween tale Something Wicked This Way Comes. Looking closer, it doesn’t actually appear to be a carnival at all, but as Meagan notes, “something sinister is clearly blowing into town,” similar to Something Wicked‘s storyline.

“There’s always some kind of historical context embedded in his films, so the kite thing just stuck with me,” Meagan also notes. Indeed we can probably expect Nope to have social commentary and some kind of real world context, if Get Out and Us are any indication.