‘Nope’ Alien Design: How Jellyfish and ’90s Anime Inspired Jordan Peele’s New Monster

Warning: Major Nope spoilers ahead. 

For the first hour of the movie, the Nope alien is your standard flying saucer. It’s a simple, classic UFO design—a flat disc with a hemisphere on top—that harkens back to ’50s sci-fi films and Fox Mulder’s “I Want to Believe” poster. It’s familiar to the point of nearly being comforting.

But Jordan Peele is a filmmaker who knows how to have his cake and eat it too. Because about halfway through Nope—which is now available to rent on digital platforms like Amazon Prime, Vudu, and more—that traditional flying saucer morphs into something that is unlike any creature you’ve seen on screen before. This is no alien spaceship. This is an alien animal. It sucks up horses and people through its giant gaping mouth, absorbing them in its claustrophobic esophagus, and spitting out the remains.

In the film’s big climactic showdown between protagonist OJ Haywood (played by Daniel Kaluuya) and this creature, the Nope alien—nicknamed Jean Jacket, after OJ’s old horse—assumes its final form. It balloons out like an ethereal, otherworldly parachute. It shimmers and flaps. Its eye—a metallic, green square—puckers and pulses. It’s as beautiful as it is disturbing.

While the Nope alien came in part from the brilliant, imaginative mind of Jordan Peele, the writer/director also turned to real-life sea creatures for inspiration on its movement and behavior. The filmmaking team consulted animal behavior experts—including John O. Dabiri, an aeronautics and mechanical engineering professor at CalTech, who researches fluid mechanics and flow physics in ocean creatures.

In an interview with Thrillist, Dabiri shed some light on how real-life physics and animal behavior studies influenced the Nope alien design. “I took [the filmmakers] down to our lab here at CalTech,” Dabiri said. “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.”

Comb jellyfish, Dabiri added, was a particular inspiration for the quick, stealthy way that Jean Jacket zipped through the sky, only pausing briefly to attack prey. “In the first part of the movie, you’re just seeing glimpses of Jean Jacket. It doesn’t do the really big, dramatic displays until toward the end. Some biological creatures do as much as they can to stay under the radar, so to speak, by keeping a pretty rigid shape. And only occasionally, if those comb jellies, for example, are going to eat prey, they will very quickly do that, and then go back to that stealth mode.”

That said, some of the details for Jean Jacket were purely pulled from Peele’s imagination—in particular, that metallic, rectangular eye. Said Dabiri, “That last scene, where you’re seeing the display from Jean Jacket, with those sort of ribbons coming out and flapping, we had some interesting conversations about what that might look like in a real animal versus what he had in his mind. He really wanted that rectangular geometry for the eye, that flapping motion. You don’t typically see that too much in biology, those really regular features, but, in a sense, I think that was intentional here. To say that there are parts of this, even by earthly biological standards, that are bizarre and really not of this world.”

Dabiri also noted that there was a lot of footage and lore surrounding Jean Jacket that was ultimately cut from the film, which he hopes to someday see released.

And Peele was inspired by art, as well as science, when it came to Jean Jacket’s final form. According to the production notes for the film, it  was inspired in part by the 1995 anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, which features otherworldly creatures known as “Angels.” In a comprehensive breakdown of how the anime may have inspired Nope, Slashfilm posits that Jean Jacket was possibly drawn from the fifth Angel Ramiel and the sixteenth Angel Armisael.

Shout-out to Jordan Peele for turning “watching anime” into legitimate artistic research. Jean Jacket will no doubt be haunting all of our nightmares for many years to come.