The inspirations behind the monster in Nope

polygon.com:

Moviegoers who ventured out to see the premiere of Nope, Jordan Peele’s new sci-fi alien horror thriller starring Keke Palmer, Daniel Kaluuya, and Steven Yeun, walked out of the theater this weekend with a lot of questions. One of the most common and pointed was, “What the hell was up with that freaky-ass UFO?”

While the extraterrestrial menace at the heart of Peele’s latest, dubbed “Jean Jacket” by Nope protagonists OJ (“Otis Jr.”) and Emerald Haywood, is commonly referred to as a UFO (unidentified flying object) early on in the film, the alternate term — UAP, or “unidentified aerial phenomenon” — is perhaps more accurate. But that term doesn’t come close to describing the creature’s actual appearance, which was drawn from a variety of sources.

[Ed. note: Major spoilers ahead for Nope.]

Over the course of the film, the UAP assumes several terrifying forms, which make it roughly something of a cross between a shark, a flying saucer, a manta ray, a flat humongous man-eating eyeball, and a “biblically accurate” angel.

We’ve pulled together a short list of the known influences behind the creature’s design to get a handle of just what the heck we were looking at.

Steven Spielberg’s work is a prominent influence on the extraterrestrial terror’s bizarre appearance and inscrutable motivations. Jean Jacket’s behavior and modus operandi bear a striking resemblance to the eponymous great white shark of Spielberg’s 1975 summer blockbuster Jaws.

Aside from an appetite for unsuspecting humans, the biggest similarity between Jean Jacket and Jaws (or “Bruce,” the crew’s nickname for the animatronic shark used in the film) is in how little each creature is seen throughout most of their respective films. Peele adopts Spielberg’s