Jor­dan Peele puts evil in the air with the first trail­er for Nope

Aca­reer come­di­an before going full-time film­mak­er, Jor­dan Peele knows the impor­tance of hold­ing your audi­ence. His two films reel view­ers in with a hook and then keep them engaged with a twist: a vis­it to meet your psy­cho white in-laws turns out to be a grotesque rit­u­al involv­ing hyp­no­sis and body-swap­ping, and an attack from dop­pel­gängers is revealed to be the first phase of a rev­o­lu­tion by an Amer­i­can shadow-population.

And so as we pre­pare for the release of his rabid­ly antic­i­pat­ed third film, teased by a new trail­er on this morn­ing of Super Bowl Sun­day, we’re left to won­der what he’s got in store with the enig­mat­ic Nope. Though this time around, the spot leaves us in the dark on both lev­els, giv­ing up nei­ther the set­up nor its secret under­ly­ing nature.

The clip opens with a com­mer­cial for the Hay­wood Ranch, where the two young own­ers (Daniel Kalu­uya and Keke Palmer, seem­ing­ly por­tray­ing sib­lings) rent out their sta­ble of steeds as the only Black-owned horse train­ers in the biz. They seem to have it pret­ty good in their idyl­lic inland pock­et of Cal­i­forn­ian coun­try, until some­thing – a sin­is­ter cloud, per­haps? – arrives to put them both in grave danger.

Some­how fig­ur­ing into this puz­zle box of ter­ror: a rodeo emcee played by Steven Yeun, a motor­cy­clist with a reflec­tive hel­met and a cam­era set­up, a woman with a severe­ly deformed face, a crab, and a fore­bod­ing­ly drip­py hand. The men­tion of the ear­ly Muy­bridge film­strips, in which an unnamed Black jock­ey (claimed by Kalu­uya and Palmer’s char­ac­ters as a dis­tant rel­a­tive) rides a gal­lop­ing horse, sug­gests that this could be a com­men­tary on the his­to­ry or cur­rent state of cin­e­ma. The two leads are, after all, in the industry.

At this ear­ly junc­ture, the only thing to be sure about is anoth­er orig­i­nal, sin­gu­lar­ly chill­ing vision for the hor­ror genre. But hey, if Jor­dan Peele can teach the peo­ple of Amer­i­ca who Ead­weard Muy­bridge is with just a com­mer­cial, that’s already a win.

Nope comes to cin­e­mas in the UK and US on 22 July.