Warning! Mild spoilers for Nope ahead!
A Silver Age Flash story eerily predicted major themes and plot points from Jordan Peele’s Nope film over 60 years before the movie hit theaters.
Nope is a 2022 American neo-Western science fiction horror film directed, written, and co-produced by Jordan Peele. The film centers on estranged horse-wrangling siblings attempting to capture evidence of an unidentified flying object terrorizing their ranch. Eventually they discover that the UFO is not a spaceship, but a predatory, territorial creature that disguises itself as a cloud to remain undetected. Peele explained his decision to include a major focus on clouds in the film to the Associated Press:
"Every now and then you'll see a cloud that sits alone and is too low, and it gives me this vertigo and this sense of Presence with a capital P. I can't describe it, but I knew if I could bottle that and put it into a horror movie, it might change the way people look at the sky."
However, keen-eyed comic book fans already knew to be wary of creatures from above thanks to a Flash story published more than 60 years before Nope was released in theaters.
The Flash story “The Invasion of the Cloud Creatures!” published in 1960's The Flash #111, written by John Broome and illustrated by Carmine Infantino, has several striking similarities Flash is one of the greatest superheroes of all time.
Both Alien-Clouds Represent An Iconic Storytelling Theme
The theme of man versus nature is a common one in storytelling, and it has been explored in many different ways throughout the history of literature, film, and television. This theme pits the forces of nature against the abilities and resilience of human beings, often with dramatic and thought-provoking results. The man versus nature theme is a powerful and enduring one in storytelling, as it taps into our primal fear of the unknown and the natural world. Both Nope and the classic Flash comic elevate this conflict—literally and metaphorically—by focusing on the existence of predatory alien life. Furthermore, characters in both stories recognize that providing the first concrete evidence of extraterrestrial life has the potential to revolutionize our entire understanding of the universe.
Flash Saves The Day But Misses The Point of Peele’s Antagonist
Despite this striking similarity, the two stories are distinct in their details and messages. While Flash's antagonists are simply alien foes that need to be defeated, make Nope so meaningful.
