NOPE- My Kind of "Horror"

     Recently I was tasked with presenting a report and analysis of the film Nope (2022) which was directed by Jordan Peele for my Multicultural Film class. Having watched Nope a few years ago, I rewatched it today in order to refresh my memory, and to my surprise, I ended up liking it a lot more than I remembered!

    I want to preface this by saying I am decidedly NOT a fan of the horror genre. As much as I'd like to say something smart-sounding like how I think they're cheaply written and provide little more substance other than being gore-fests, in reality I have to admit that I'm really just a bit of a coward when it comes to scary movies. I'm very easily startled by loud noises or jumpscares in films (if there is a sudden sting of music I could literally jump while watching a comedy movie) and so whenever I get invited to watch a properly scary movie, I usually fumble with my excuses and say I'm busy or something.

    In my opinion, the main thing that has put me off from horror lately has been how the genre has been reduced to jumpscare gore slopfests. Personally, I've always been more of a fan of the suspense or the tension of these scary movies rather than just the scariness of the film's subject itself. For example, when watching Jaws, audiences were more tense during the first half of the film, when the shark isn't fully shown and it picks off victims quickly and suddenly. While the latter end of the film is still scary, when the shark's face is fully displayed and its attacking the ship over and over and killing the main characters, the lasting impression of the film isn't based on those scenes- it's more centered around the initial depiction of the shark in the opening, playing into the fear of the unknown.

    Everyone's heard of the idea that in movies, the monster is less scary once you know what it looks like. This rings true for movies like Alien, Jaws, A Quiet Place, and so on. However, the reason that these films are all hailed as classics for scary monster movies is how expertly the play on the fear of the unknown, and how they utilize tension to truly scare audiences, even after the monster has been revealed.

    In this sense,  Nope has earned a spot amongst these movies in my opinion. Peele consistently subverts audience expectations for the nature of the antagonist in the film, first by having the characters question if the threat is even real, then mistaking it for a alien spaceship before ultimately realizing that instead of being a UFO, the alien is the ship. The line "What if it's not a ship" still rings in my head after watching the movie: it's a brilliant subversion of expectations for what an alien movie is like, and it further ties it into the movie's themes of animal spectacles and understanding how animals behave. It's concepts like these that make me like the film so much: just when we think we understand what's going on with the aliens, there's a new layer of context that's peeled back to further confuse audiences.

    Even basic concepts like how UFOs suck things up into them, which is an action we assign to alien ships with tractor beams, are flipped on their head with the reveal that the UFO is the alien itself. Immediately the audience is thrust into a world of doubt, confusion, then ultimately horror as realization of what that means sets in. Just when we think we understand what's going on, we are once again submerged in the fear of the unknown as Peele subverts our understanding of what an alien can be. Then once this is revealed, the dread comes to a head when the alien eventually reveals itself fully as it devours an entire crowd of people by sucking them into it, and then showing how the digestion happens within the alien. The pinnacle of "horror" in this movie has absolutely zero gore- it is illustrated almost completely with auditory techniques, and some cramped, claustrophobic shots of the monster's insides.

    To me, this is what the best horror is- where you let the audience fill in the blanks. Even after revealing the monster and how it works, the alien is still so far removed of what the audience's preconception of what an alien looks/acts like that its still incomprehensibly scary. The shots are hard to understand at first, with dark lighting, tight framing, and constant switching between shots to capture the confusion of the people who are being consumed. But its the auditory component that makes this scene chilling: the screams of the people within, the rubbery noise of the people sliding through the alien's tight digestive tracts, everything comes together to create an absolutely terrifying, disorienting idea of what the alien is.

    This feat is impressive as hell to me- with just a few scenes, Jordan Peele had beaten the monster movie rule that dominates every other film, which is the aforementioned "don't show the monster". With Nope, he has proved that even if the audience knows what the monster looks like and acts like, there is still incomprehensible horrors that the audience will never even begin to know, and that is what separates Nope from the modern goreslop of today's horror movies. I value the technique in this film far more than any scary jumpscare or gory kill in movies, and that's why I recommend the watch, even for people who don't usually like horror movies!