Nope: Jordan Peele says film transcends horror

Jordan Peele’s ‘Nope’ is the next anticipated summer release that’ll reunite the ‘Get Out’ director with Oscar-winning Daniel Kaluuya in a story where two siblings embark to record video evidence of a UFO. 

Peele has made a name as an upcoming horror director to watch out for, alongside the likes of Ari Aster and Robert Eggers. The 43-year-old, who was the other half of the comic duo Key and Peele, followed his much acclaimed first film with ‘Up’, another horror outing starring Lupita Nyong’o. 

Speaking to Essence magazine recently, Peele detailed that ‘Nope’ had to be more than ‘Black horror’ to speak to current times. 

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“It’s so tricky being considered in the vanguard of Black horror, because obviously Black horror is so very real, and it’s hard to do it in a way that’s not re-traumatizing and sad”, he said, adding “I was going into my third horror film starring Black leads, and somewhere in the process I realized that the movie had to be about Black joy as well, in order to fit what the world needs at this moment. So that is part of why there’s sort of a spectrum of tonality of genre in here, because I wanted to give the horror, but I also wanted to give our characters agency and adventure and hope and joy and fun that they deserve.”

When the director pitched the film to the ‘Black Panther‘ actor, he described it as a “great American UFO horror movie that I haven’t seen” and added “I think one of the things we have with this film is a movie that transcends the horror genre, in a way. The first film clip [Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion] was essentially a Black man on a horse who has been forgotten and erased. Part of this film, to me, is a celebration and a response to that. We can be the leads not only of a horror movie but also action, adventure, comedy, etcetera.”

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The 33-year-old British actor, meanwhile, told Essence that Peele is expanding the horror genre again with ‘Nope’, this time adding “scale and epic-ness”. 

The film releases on July 22.