How real animals and anime antagonists inspired Nope’s alien monster

Filmgoers braved the elements to catch the premier of Nope, Jordan Peele’s new sci-fi alien horror thriller starring Keke Palmer, Daniel Kaluuya, and Steven Yeun, walked out of the theater this weekend with a lot of questions. One of the most common and pointed was, “What the hell was up with that freaky-ass UFO?”

While the extraterrestrial menace at the heart of Peele’s latest, dubbed “Jean Jacket” by Nope protagonists OJ (“Otis Jr.”) and Emerald Haywood, is commonly referred to as a UFO (unidentified flying object) early on in the film, the alternate term — UAP, or “unidentified aerial phenomenon” — is perhaps more accurate. But that term doesn’t come close to describing the creature’s actual appearance, which was drawn from a variety of sources.

[Ed. note: Major spoilers ahead for Nope.]

Over the course of the film, the UAP assumes several terrifying forms, which make it roughly something of a cross between a shark, a flying saucer, a manta ray, a flat humongous man-eating eyeball, and a “biblically accurate” angel.

We’ve pulled together a short list of the known influences behind the creature’s design to get a handle of just what the heck we were looking at.

Jaws

Universal Pictures

Steven Spielberg’s work is a prominent influence on the extraterrestrial terror’s bizarre appearance and inscrutable motivations. Jean Jacket’s behavior and modus operandi bear a striking resemblance to the eponymous great white shark of Spielberg’s 1975 summer blockbuster Jaws.

Aside from an appetite for unsuspecting humans, the biggest similarity between Jean Jacket and Jaws (or “Bruce,” the crew’s nickname for the animatronic shark used in the film) is in how little each creature is seen throughout most of their respective films. Peele adopts Spielberg’s approach of suggesting the antagonist’s presence rather than explicitly showing it, and wrapping that approach into the film’s larger themes about the perils of seeking out spectacle, even at the expense of one’s own sanity or life.

Sahaquiel, Neon Genesis Evangelion

Image: Khara

Movie-goers often make the same comparison when they watch movies. Nope’s creature this weekend was to the otherworldly antagonists of Hideaki Anno’s 1995 apocalyptical mecha anime Neon Genesis Evangelion — the creatures known as “Angels.”

The universe of Neon Genesis Evangelion, the term “Angel” is used to describe a mysterious species of gigantic creature, ancestral variants of humankind that have lain dormant in and around Earth for countless millennia. Throughout this series, actions taken by the SEELE clandestine secret society and NERV secret government agency, Commander GendoIkari invokes the wrath and tries to end humanity.

Jean Jacket’s appearance and design most closely resembles Sahaquiel, the 10th Angel, which appears in the 12th episode of the original 1995 anime, “A Miracle’s Worth,” and the second film in the Rebuild of Evangelion tetralogy, Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance. In the episode and film, the Angel inexplicably appears in Earth’s orbit on a crash course with the city Tokyo-3, forcing NERV and the Evangelion pilots to coordinate in a race to intercept the creature before it collides into the Earth and destroys the surrounding city.

Though Jordan Peele hasn’t come out and explicitly cited Neon Genesis EvangelionAs an influence Nope, he did publicly make his fandom of the series clear on Twitter in the days leading up to the film’s release:

Coincidence? No, it’s not.

Purple People Eater

In a scene late in Nope, Michael Wincott’s gravel-voiced cinematographer Antlers Holst ironically recites lyrics from Sheb Wooley’s 1958 comedy rock song “The Purple People Eater” while Antlers and the protagonists devise their plot to lure Jean Jacket out of hiding in order to get a coveted “Oprah shot” of extraterrestrial life. While Jean Jacket isn’t purple, doesn’t manifest anything resembling a horn, and certainly doesn’t seem motivated by anything close to a love of rock ’n’ roll, it certainly demonstrates a preference for food that’s not “too tough,” such as the horse statue it devours and subsequently belches out partway through the film.

Other aquatic animals such as jellyfish and squids

Reinhard Dirscherl/ullstein bild via Getty Images

GABRIEL BOOUYS/AFP should be the photo credit via Getty Images

Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images

John O. Dabiri, CalTech Professor of UFO or UAP Design, spoke to Thrillist about his experiences as a consultant. NopeThe creature was described by Dabiri as an amalgamation of terrestrial aquatic lifeforms, such as jellyfish and squid. “I took them down to our lab here at CalTech,” Dabiri says. “When we feed our jellyfish, they have what are called oral arms, which are these almost silk-like ribbons that end up getting released and displayed when they’re feeding. It’s really cool to see the analogy between feeding time in my lab, when we put little tiny baby shrimp in there and they all get pulled and caught with the tentacles, versus what you see at the end of the movie, that same type of unfurling of Jean Jacket.”

Among the various species of jellyfish, Dabiri specifically cited the ghost knifefish as an direct influence on Jean Jacket’s design, comparing its ability to generate electric fields to the creature’s ability to generate an EMP field capable of knocking out all electric power in its vicinity.