For a while, we had no idea which film would be Guillermo del Toro’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning “The Shape of Water.” Would it be Netflix’s “Pinocchio?” Or perhaps something completely different? Well, we now know that the next film on his slate is “Nightmare Alley” and over the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen the cast come together with one of the most star-studded affairs that we’ve seen in a while.
Speaking to Collider, del Toro talked more about “Nightmare Alley,” and specifically about how he expects to create his first noir film that actually combines his love of horror with the darkness of the aforementioned genre. If you’re not familiar with “Nightmare Alley,” the film is said to follow a con man and the cast and crew of a carnival in the mid-20th century.
“My adaptation that I’ve done with [co-writer] Kim Morgan is not necessarily—the entire book is impossible, it’s a saga,” said del Toro. “But there are elements that are darker in the book, and it’s the first chance I have—in my short films I wanted to do noir. It was horror and noir. And now is the first chance I have to do a real underbelly of society type of movie. [There are] no supernatural elements. Just a straight, really dark story.”
Of course, when you bring up dark and noir, the next logical question is about a rating. Del Toro has never been one to shy away from an R-rating and it appears for “Nightmare Alley,” he’s not only setting it up for adult audiences only but embracing the more extreme rating.
“[‘Nightmare Alley’ will be a] big R. Double R!” he said.
We’re not the biggest scholars of the MPAA, but last we checked, there is no RR-rating for films. So, we’re looking at a film where del Toro is going to probably push the limits of a typical R-rating and give “Nightmare Alley” the chance to fully embrace the horror that the filmmaker loves so much.
We always say that ratings can’t be a determining factor about the quality of a film, but in the case of “Nightmare Alley” and Guillermo del Toro, we are pretty excited that the director isn’t going to neuter anything in the film to make it appeal to mass audiences.