In The Grapes of Wrath, there’s a phrase that Steinbeck uses early on that I have never forgotten and that I have shamelessly brought into my own writing: “Now and then the flies roared softly at the screen door. The coffee machine spurted steam, and the waitress, without looking, reached behind her and shut it off.”

“Roared softly.” That’s a gift. A fly is incapable of making a noise that any of us, with our perspective, could call loud. And Steinbeck refuses to use a verb that anyone else would use there; the fly does not “buzz” or “hum” or even like, “murmur.” It roars. The sound of the fly is given a nobility, a force. The whine has been extracted from the fly like a parasite extracted from its abdomen. Yet it doesn’t stop there. The flies don’t roar, of course. No one sits up straight and feels the chill in the spine because a fly roars. Thus the flies must roar softly. Gorgeous, unpredictable. It does not force you to put the book down and look to the sky tearfully and thank God for John Steinbeck’s prose stylings. (Who are you, Marcus Mumford?) On the other hand, it’s this delicious little moment that rewards the slow read, the reread, the close read. Contradiction makes an aesthetic truth. Enter “bad miracle.”

The greatest movie about bad miracles, until proven otherwise, is Gojira. That a new creature should be formed in reaction to radiation is miraculous, but at least in the first film, horrific. This has me thinking about what the first American bad miracle movie is, and at the risk of absolutely embarrassing myself when I come up with a better example two weeks from now, I’d pick Werewolf of London, a less heralded Universal horror from 1935. Like Frankenstein and The Invisible Man, it’s a film where a scientist in the process of going beyond human understanding. Unlike those, Werewolf of London is about a scientist who stumbles into a discovery quite by accident. Botanist Glendon seeks the Mariphasa flower in the Himalayas, is attacked by a werewolf, and afterwards is locked into multiple battles: growing the Mariphasa, a rival werewolf/scientist seeking the flower, and above all, the conflict with his own body and the murderous impulses rising within it. That’s a bad miracle, and most interestingly for this idea, the miracle cannot be fixed. The flower itself can reverse the transformation, but there are only so many of these, and the film does not give us the suggestion that Mariphasa tablets could be fabricated.

The bad miracle of Nope is as mysterious and unimagined as the werewolf that attacks Glendon in Tibet. Jean Jacket simply is, appearing without any expectation. Like a werewolf, Jean Jacket can be killed; unlike a werewolf, doing so requires a heck of a lot more imagination and a much more rigorous understanding of Christian Metz and apparatus theory. As much as I appreciate the poetry of “bad miracle,” I am equally grateful to Jordan Peele for not trying to explain the miracle away. No one asked how Jesus was turning five loaves and two fishes into enough to feed several thousand people.