Guillermo Del Toros's next film Nightmare Alley marks a departure for the director. Searchlight Pictures released a new trailer on Thursday that shows the Oscar-winning filmmaker trading his fascination with the supernatural in exchange for an R-rated noir film set around a carnival.
Nightmare Alley features Bradley Cooper as Stanton Carlisle a nightclub mind reader, who gets tangled up in Cate Blanchett's Dr. Lilith Ritter, an aspiring psychiatrist, to prove him a fraud. Even without Del Toros' usual monsters, the teaser trailer is plenty tense. It features carnival sideshows and Blanchett playing a femme fatale. The teaser video above will show you how it looks.
Nightmare Alley
A Film by Guillermo del Toro
Only in Theaters December 17 @RealGDT pic.twitter.com/zfEU7aeGG9 Searchlight Pictures (@searchlightpics) September 15, 2021
According to Vanity Fair, Del Toros deliberately avoided many tropes in noir cinema with Nightmare Alley. Del Toro said that he would not be doing the voiceovers and Venetian blinds and detectives wearing fedoras on wet streets. This also applies to the fact that director Del Toro chose not to include supernatural elements into his R-rated noir. Nightmare Alley, the 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham, is based on the terrible things that people do to Cooper's character. The trailer suggests that the film is a natural evolution of the monster metaphors Del Toro used since his beginnings, but this time it is fully integrated into the real, just equally terrifying, world.
Nightmare Alley premieres December 17th.
