The “man or beast” at the center of Nightmare Alley is Cooper’s character, Stanton Carlisle. He’s a former carnival worker who uses the tricks he learned there to con millionaires out of their money by pretending he’s a mind reader. This, of course, does not go over well and gets the shady character into lots of trouble.
The movie is based on a 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham, which was famously made into another film soon after, in 1947. Del Toro (along with co-writer Kim Morgan) drew from the novel, not the movie, for this adaptation and was less enamored with the full, complex story than the unique noir world it’s set in. “I wanted to do the universe of the novel, which is a little gritty, but also strangely magical. It has a very strange, mystical allure—and mythical. I was very attracted to that possibility,” he said.
Fox is opening Nightmare Alley in theaters only on December 17, clearly setting it up for another Guillermo del Toro awards run. Will this film noir with a very supernatural feel, even if it’s not actually supernatural, do the trick? We’d never bet against the man behind Pacific Rim, Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone.
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