How the ‘Nightmare Alley’ Team Explored Human Monstrosity With Guillermo del Toro’s Carnival Noir

Guillermo del Toro‘s latest offering Nightmare Alley is likely to be both familiar and unfamiliar ground to fans of his monstrously popular work.

Known for Pacific Rim, Crimson Peak and Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro is certainly leaning into his love of monster metaphors, despite there being few actual monsters in his first spin in the director’s chair since the Oscar-winning Shape of Water. For producer Miles Dale, who worked with the Mexican movie helmer on the 2018 best picture winner, the “movie is a great evolution of his filmmaking style.”

“It doesn’t have literal monsters, but I think his examination is of what is in us that is monstrous,” Dale told The Hollywood Reporter at the Wednesday night New York carpet for the upcoming Searchlight Pictures film. “It’s really the same kind of parable, just without people with gills and fins.”

“He looks at the carnival, much as with Tod Browning’s Freaks. Those people were seen as ‘abnormal,’ but they are still a family and they understand each other with all their warts. Yet, when we get to the big city, the ‘refined people,’ the big shots, are the monsters. They are ruthless. They are evil.”

The film follows Bradley Cooper‘s Stanton Carlisle, a charismatic but down on his luck “carny” who, after learning a few things from Toni Collette’s clairvoyant Zeena, as well as her mentalist husband Pete (David Strathairn), attempts a grift alongside Cate Blanchett’s sharp but mysterious psychiatrist Dr. Lilith Ritter. Their target is Richard Jenkins’ dangerous tycoon Ezra Grindle.

Strathairn told THR that the film “is a world of people [who] are making moves for their own ends to survive, and yet they’re all contained on the same chessboard and interdependent on each other.” Their journeys are (darkly) human ones, about “confronting deep desperation” alongside “incredible joy and seeming success.” It’s a timeless story despite the film’s 1930s carnival and noir feel.

“It’s a movie about what you carry with you from your past — how that compromises or propels you. And what happens when you find yourself alone,” he explained. “How do you survive or how do you continue being the person that you were? Or do you change?”

Tim Blake Nelson, frequent del Toro collaborator and the actor behind Nightmare Alley‘s “Carny Boss,” acknowledges that the film is an examination of monstrous human behavior, but says capitalism is also among the monstrosities in the neo-noir psychological thriller.

“This movie is about the monster that is capitalism,” he explained. “The dark underbelly of capitalism. It’s a real indictment of that. It’s lacerating and it’s strangely beautiful doing so.”

“If you’re a fan of the original film or the novel, this film — he takes all the themes just goes layers deeper,” said star Clifton Collins Jr. of del Toro’s take. “It’s far more cerebral and it was fascinating, fascinating to watch it evolve. I haven’t seen the final product, but I had read like, over COVID to multiple graphs from beginning to end, because it was just fun to read the evolution.”

But the director’s examination of the film’s “monsters” and what makes them tick is not only visible in the narrative heart of a movie he had been working to adapt for 30 years. Like all of his highly stylized work, this theme was baked into everything from the sets to the costuming and the music.

For Luis Sequeira, who served as the movie’s costume designer, he traveled to Europe three times to identify and purchase fabrics. And when it finally came to building the looks, special attention was paid to Cooper’s Stanton, whose clothes were not only “impeccably tailored” to illustrate his standing but constantly changed to show his layers — or masks.

“[Bradley’s character is] someone who disregards his whole past and through that disregards everything he’s ever known to basically change himself into another being. With the clothing, there was absolutely nothing that went from the beginning to the end, so we were able to actually see this change on the character.”

According to composer Nathan Johnson, he avoided trying to think about the film’s genres and instead wrote those unmaskings into the film’s score, which Johnson described as much more “amoebic” than his “sharp and precise” work on fellow noir Knives Out. He did this by using a “repeating piano note that doesn’t change” even as all the other instruments — and masks — come on and off.

“We’re moving close to that note and away from that note dissonantly and harmonically. But when we strip it all away at the end, we’re left with that single percussive piano.”

As for Blanchett’s character, who he described as a “shark swimming under deep water,” Johnson worked with “wide open harmonies that are ambiguous and just unsettling.”

“It’s pretty but also there’s something dark under there,” he added.

While the film dabbles in multiple genres, the period piece is an almost love letter to a specific era in Hollywood movie-making that manages to embody contemporary elements. This not only gives it a signature spin but also helps make it a more universal tale.

For production designer Tamara Deverell, who says del Toro wasn’t “particularly trying to be film noir” despite an expectation and early talks about the movie “being black and white,” she did lean into art deco — both past and modern styling. They were also inspired by painters like Vilhelm Hammershoi and Andrew Wyeth.

“We tried to be historically accurate, but I was also looking at modern versions of art deco. There’s a hotel in Hong Kong that I use as a direct reference for Grendel’s office — the rich mogul in the movie,” she said. “I looked at a lot of Fritz Lang’s I and a lot of older films through the 30s and 40s had that the deco look to [them].”

And while Deverell acknowledges that the film was working mostly in human monster metaphors, she says they did manage to get in a few creepy carnival elements.

“For the human monstrosity, we tried to be very real,” she told THR. “For a Guillermo del Toro movie, it was not really monster-based, but we did do some of the pickle punks and the geek pit. But really the monster really is the human, ultimately, thematically.”

Beyond conversations about dark characters and the film’s spin on monstrosity, the New York carpet — held at the Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall alongside simultaneous premieres in Los Angeles and Toronto — was also a time to recognize the extra work the Nightmare Alley team put into filing around the pandemic.

After shutting down in March 2020 six weeks into the shoot and resuming in September of that year, Davis acknowledged the shoot was complicated for the movie’s team of problem solvers by its carnival setting, which featured 250 extras, as well as a busy high profile cast.

“More than that, how do we not get in the way of public health and take PPE and testing and everything else that would more properly go to the people who need it more than people making movies,” he explained. How do we make a set that is still creative and comfortable where people can feel safe, even if we know they’re safe? That was a bit of a challenge.”

In Toronto, a year of pandemic darkness at Bell Lightbox, the year-round home of the Toronto Film Festival, was replaced by cocktails and chin-stroking cinephiles getting a first look at Nightmare Alley as part of the simultaneous cross-border bow.

The audience was filled with Toronto crew members and creatives that shot Nightmare Alley locally, as the city and local regions like Markham, Oshawa and Hamilton were filled with vintage clothing and vehicles for the film noir era look.

“It’s really remarkable that this movie got made at all,” Toronto Film Fest CEO Cameron Bailey said.

Etan Vlessing contributed to this story.