‘Nightmare Alley’ Black-And-White Release Will Ratchet Up The Noir

Guillermo del Toro has been directing movies since 1986 with his first short film Doña Lupe. Many were familiar with his horror films in the 1990s but it wasn’t until 2006 Pan’s Labyrinth that made him a household name. 

director Guillermo del Toro says video game development isn’t his thing anymore. 

Jon Burlingame editorIt isn’t often that a film composer consults with the star of the movie about his theme. But it happened on “Nightmare Alley,” as Bradley Cooper attended some of the recording sessions for Guillermo del Toro’s spooky noir film.“We did the piano sessions in L.A., on an old Motown Steinway,” says composer Nathan Johnson (“Knives Out”).

Since his 1993 debut “Cronos,” it’s always been explicit that Guillermo del Toro is a genre filmmaker at heart. Over the years, the director has tackled several different kinds of horror films.

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NEW YORK -- With a touch of Barbara Stanwyck, a sumptuous Art Deco office and a deadly shade of crimson lipstick, Cate Blanchett plays a femme fatale in Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” with cunning embrace and subversion of the film noir archetype.If “Nightmare Alley” is del Toro’s lushly composed love letter to noir, the movie’s pulpy heart is in Blanchett’s conniving psychiatrist Lilith Ritter.

Holdovers Drive My Car, Red Rocket and The Scary Of Sixty First looked good in limited runs on a weekend with few new specialty releases and even fewer numbers. Streamers – which presented The Lost Daughter (Netflix), Swan Song (Apple) and The Tender Bar (Amazon), don’t reveal them and smaller distributors often report early in the week.

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“Nightmare Alley” is an adaptation of the William Lindsey Gresham novel of the same name, and finds del Toro working without supernatural elements for the first time in his career. Production initially began in January 2020, but COVID shut down filming in March.

Warning: The below contains spoilers for “Nightmare Alley”“Nightmare Alley” is unique in filmmaker Guillermo del Toro’s filmography in a couple of different respects. For one, it’s his first film without any supernatural elements whatsoever.

latest film — about a small-time carnival worker (Bradley Cooper) who grifts his way into high society by claiming to read minds and commune with the dead — has all the trappings of the genre: drunk degenerates and femme fatales; dimly lit streets and stalking shadows; greed, lust, murder, hubris and a creeping existential dread.

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Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and MediaGuillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” exists in a kind of moral murk as its central character goes on a journey that will earn him wealth and influence but will also plunge him into a dark crisis of the soul.Now, the film will get a re-release with a color palette that more completely reflects that ambiguity. Searchlight Pictures announced Friday that it will oversee a special limited run of del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” in black and white.

Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” is already getting a rerelease in a special new format. Los Angeles audiences will get the chance to see Del Toro’s ’40s noir film in black & white.Searchlight Pictures will host a limited run engagement for “Nightmare Alley: Vision and Darkness and Light,” which will be a black & white print of the film screened on 35mm film stock.

Guillermo Del Toro is not as prolific as some of his peers when it comes to feature films, but it’s still somewhat surprising it’s taken this long for him to work with Cate Blanchett. They both had their breakthrough moments in the mid-to-late-1990s and Blanchett could have easily stepped into the worlds of any “Hellboy” movie, “The Shape of Water,” or “Crimson Peak” without a second glance.

A title like “ Nightmare Alley,” especially when paired with a filmmaker like Guillermo del Toro, suggests a certain kind of movie. Del Toro, the director of “The Shape of Water” and “Pan’s Labyrinth,” has a signature style after all.But “Nightmare Alley” is not about a haunted house or the supernatural.

“Nightmare Alley,” and he originally planned to team up with another known cinephile: Leonardo DiCaprio. The Oscar-winning “The Revenant” actor was originally attached to star in “Nightmare Alley” for del Toro, but was eventually replaced with Bradley Cooper in the role of Stanton Carlisle.While speaking with TheWrap about the journey of getting “Nightmare Alley” to the screen, del Toro explained exactly why DiCaprio’s casting didn’t happen.

Jane Campion would like to apologize. “I didn’t get back to you that weekend because I got sick,” she says.