10 Exact Moments Horror Movies Stop Trying

10. Nope (2022)

Writer-director Jordan Peele's third effort, Nope, brings UFOs to the US desert – precisely where they belong. We join Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as OJ and Em Haywood, a brother-sister horse-wrangling team working with the movie biz in California. But when their ranch is beset by strange occurrences – random objects falling from the clouds, horses going missing, electricity fluctuating – they look to the skies for their answers, where a Stetson-shaped UFO is a-lurkin’.

Despite having plenty of experience in the horror arena, with two prior features (Us and Get Out) that manage to sustain and develop their core concerns in genuinely surprising ways, Peele fumbles the ball on Nope. And the moment the film begins to fail is the Star Lasso Experience scene: former child star Jupe Park (Steven Yeun) puts on a show designed to entice the UFO out, and the entire crowd winds up getting sucked up inside the creature's big fabric belly, showing us its basic design first-hand.

After a strong start and plenty of tantalising mystery, Peele chucks it all in by making the UFO just a big, dumb beast to be tamed, and the strange events surrounding it are reduced to it just eating things. As a result, Nope becomes a creature feature of the wrong kind.