In the last years, Guillermo del Toro has been very busy writing and producing horror and fantasy projects like the documentary Ayotzinapa, El paso de la Tortuga (2018), the animation TV series 3Below: Tales of Arcadia (2018–2019), Wizards (2020), and Trollhunters: Tales of Arcadia (2016–2018), the animation film sequel Trollhunters: Rise of the Titans (2021), and the movies Antlers (2021), The Witches (2020), Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019), and Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018). But what the fans really want is a movie with Del Toro in charge of everything, a follow-up for his latest and astonishing film The Shape of Water (2017), and finally this year we will have it.
Guillermo del Toro returns as a director with Nightmare Alley (2021), a neo-noir psychological thriller where an ambitious carny with a talent for manipulating people with a few well-chosen words hooks up with a female psychiatrist who is even more dangerous than he is.
The movie is called an extraordinary description of a freak-show geek alcoholic and abject, and the object of the voyeuristic crowd’s gleeful disgust and derision going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There’s no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him.
Nightmare Alley (2021) is an adaptation of the novel of the same name written by William Lindsay Gresham and published in 1946. The novel was already adapted for the big screen over half a century ago in Nightmare Alley (1947), starring Tyrone Power. The screenplay for the new adaptation has been written by the director Guillermo del Toro and Kim Morgan.
The cast for Nightmare Alley (2021) is full of popular faces, some of them habitual in the Guillermo del Toro filmography. Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Rooney Mara, Paul Anderson, Toni Collette, Ron Perlman, Mary Steenburgen, Tim Blake Nelson, David Strathairn, Holt McCallany, Clifton Collins Jr., Jim Beaver, Richard Jenkins, David Hewlett, Lara Jean Chorostecki, and Romina Power star.
The movie is Rated R for strong/bloody violence, some sexual content, nudity, and language, and will have its world premiere at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles in late 2021. Later on, it is scheduled to be released theatrically by Searchlight Pictures on December 17, 2021, in the USA, and in January in the rest of the world.
Watch here the first official trailer for Nightmare Alley (2021).
