Nightmare Alley poster teases Guillermo del Toro’s mysterious thriller

Last Updated on September 16, 2021

Now that Disney has decided to give director Guillermo del Toro’s thriller Nightmare Alley a wide theatrical release on December 17th, through the Searchlight Pictures label they acquired when they purchased Fox, the marketing machine is starting to rev up. Yesterday we saw a batch of first look images from the film, and now the official poster has been unveiled. You can check out the Nightmare Alley poster below.

Based on a novel by William Lindsay Gresham (which was previously turned into a movie back in 1947), Nightmare Alley is a noir thriller set in

a world of carnival hustlers and con men, telling the story of a mentalist who teams with a psychologist in order to swindle the rich.

Copies of Gresham’s novel can be purchased at THIS LINK. Here’s the description:

Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a carnival-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.

And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he’s going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute assistant (before long his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan’s for the taking. At least for now.

Del Toro wrote the adaptation with Kim Morgan and had to heavily rework the story to fit it into a feature running time. The director/co-writer told Vanity Fair that a more straightforward adaptation would result in a six hour mini-series with shifting perspectives.

The film centers on a character played by Bradley Cooper. Cooper is joined in the cast by Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Mary Steenburgen, Rooney Mara, Ron Perlman, Toni Collette, Holt McCallany, David Strathairn, Clifton Collins Jr., Tim Blake Nelson, Jim Beaver, David Hewlett, and Richard Jenkins. 

Nightmare Alley has been rated R for “strong/bloody violence, some sexual content, nudity and language.”