Warning: Spoilers Below for Nope!
The opening Bible quote in Jordan Peele’s new movie Nope directly relates to the movie’s themes and alien. In the story of Nope, Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer play OJ and Emerald Harwood, sibling ranchers who lease horses to film and TV productions, who come to sense a mysterious UFO presence hovering over their ranch. OJ and Emerald formulate a plan to capture the UFO on camera, and this gradually reveals a side of it that puts the Bible quote that opens Nope into context.
The specific quote is from the Book of Nahum, chapter three, verse six, “And I will cast abominable filth upon thee, and make thee vile, and will set thee as a spectacle“. The inclusion of this quote comes into greater focus when OJ makes the determination that the UFO is actually an alien descending upon the Earth to devour humans, horses, and other living creatures. The alien also leaves an additional sign of its presence behind after making an attack when it ejects indigestible objects, including anything made of metal.
As OJ and Emerald recruit the help of tech support man Angel Torres (Brandon Perea) and cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) to film the alien, the “filth” and “spectacle” of the Book of Nahum quote really shine through in Nope‘s third act. The story of Nope is one based upon spectacle, with the backgrounds of its main characters in filmmaking and entertainment. Meanwhile, the nature of the alien covers the first portion of the Biblical passage with its dietary process.
How Nope’s Bible Verse Connects Perfectly To The Alien
The alien quite thoroughly casts filth upon the people and the Nope desert location after the UFO devours its prey, literally dropping a shower of inanimate debris after vacuuming upon the living things it eats. That debris frequently becomes lethal shrapnel, as seen when OJ and Emerald’s father Otis (Keith David) is killed by a coin that penetrates his skull early in the movie, which is strongly suggested to be the result of this creature’s feeding habits. The alien later even dumps blood on the Harwood house after consuming the entire audience of the nearby Jupiter’s Claim circus, run by OJ and Emerald’s friend Jupe (Steven Yeun).
The demise of Jupe’s audience, and Jupe himself, also comes when he attempts to bait the alien into appearing with a horse during a show at Jupiter’s Claim. While Jupe was making the same effort to display the alien for the world to see as OJ and Emerald, his hubris in his method costs him his life and gets his audience killed. This captures the spectacle element of the Book of Nahum quote, with the mysterious Nope movie alien showing that it will not be mocked by being made into a carnival attraction by turning the tables on the show it is planned for.
OJ and Emerald are much more strategic in how they set about filming the alien, and manage to successfully do so with Angel and Antlers’s help while walking away with their lives. In the end, the Book of Nahum quote that begins Nope perfectly illustrates the nature and danger of the movie’s extraterrestrial creature. The alien covers the Earth with the “filth” leftover from its hunts and “makes a spectacle” of those humans who regard it as such. Meanwhile, the carefully planned methods of the main Nope characters allow them to get the best of the alien and thus make a spectacle of it with the photographic proof that capture of its existence.
