Plenty of filmgoers who've already seen Jordan Peele's highly anticipated "Nope," which opens this weekend, have left the theater in high spirits. Others have left scratching their heads, trying to decipher the perplexing puzzles of the "Get Out" and "Us" filmmaker's horror/sci-fi epic.
But what comes across clearly to everyone in Peele's third film is his affection for Black cultural history and all kinds of films, both classic and obscure.
One of the first scenes alludes to one of the first moving images in film history — a man riding on a horse, captured by 19th century inventor Eadweard Muybridge. Sprinkled through "Nope" are low-key shoutouts to Alfred Hitchcock, Sidney Poitier's classic western "Buck and the Preacher" and the not-so-classic "The Scorpion King," starring Dwayne Johnson aka the Rock.
