MONSTER MASH

What Does the ‘Nope’ Monster Look Like?

A Pokemon? A squid? A vagina? The Daily Beast’s entertainment staff attempts to nail down what, exactly, the beautiful beast from “Nope” reminded us of…

There is a movie called Nope that hit theaters this weekend. Heard of it?

Jordan Peele’s latest film is a genuine summer blockbuster, a creature feature featuring electric performances, exhilarating visuals, and the requisite resonant ideas that we’ve come to expect from the filmmaker. It stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as siblings who inherit their father’s Hollywood horse-training business and, while isolated in the California hills, suspect a UFO has been hovering around.

When this UFO—beast, alien, monster, spaceship… whatever it is—begins stalking them, they hunt it in return, hoping to secure “the Oprah shot”: footage that proves aliens exist, and will lead to a cash windfall.

Are we going to spoil what happens in the coolest movie to hit theaters this summer? (Nope.) Are we going to go into major detail about the sequence when the main characters finally confront the monster? (Nope.) But if you’ve seen the film, should you read on to see what our entertainment staff thought said monster looked like? (Yep.)

Like everyone who’s seen the film, our team hasn’t stopped thinking about it. When the final act reveals exactly what the alien/monster/we’re-still-not-sure-what-to-call-it looked like, we were spellbound, impressed, and confused. What, exactly, did it remind of?

We posed the question in an open forum, and here are our answers.

Kevin Fallon:

A fancy squid (obviously)

Yet also Squidward?

A regal, yet menacing labia

That fun parachute game we’d play in gym in elementary school

Predator

That one villain from Pirates of the Caribbean with the octopus face

Cap’n Crunch

Adam Manno:

The tentacles from The Mist

The spaceship from Arrival

Allegra Frank:

This one Pokémon that scares me

A vagine, tbh

Big honkin’ belly and cavernous belly button

Coleman Spilde:

The Cadet Kelly Ribbon twirling scene

The Fifth Element blue alien diva (when miss Nope is in her final form in the sky)

The giant eyeball that watches you in the Super Mario 64 level that scared me so bad as a kid I had to stop playing.

Fletcher Peters:

A color guard team in the middle of their routine

This beautiful dress Zendaya wore

A bizarre, beribboned gift you might find at the wedding party in Corpse Bride

A hairstyle Effie Trinket would sport in The Hunger Games

Laura Bradley:

A pokemon

An extremely elaborate kite that no one could fly

A sand dollar (when it’s not showing off its tentacles)

A gorgeously labial vagina, obviously

A drag queen who’s very into reveals

Nick Schager:

A mutant butterfly

A Rorschach test blob

A shapeshifting alien-movie camera monster (due to its square, bursting “eye/lens”)

Venom’s mom

The Daily Beast

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