Guillermo del Toro and the dark Heart of Nightmare Alley

If anyone could update the cinematic language of film noir for today’s audiences, I thought, it would be Guillermo del Toro. So I wasn’t entirely shocked that his next film did exactly that, though I was surprised-and delighted-that he had chosen William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 fever dream of a novel, Nightmare Alley, as his source material. Its mix of primal behaviors,the occult,and visceral horror made the book ripe for reinterpretation by a director steeped in genre,forever ready to bend it to his own iron will.

We must begin, however, with Gresham himself. Born in Baltimore and raised in Brooklyn, he learned of the material that seeded his first novel and magnum opus, Nightmare Alley, during his time as a soldier in the Spanish Civil War, when he met an “old-time carny” named Joseph “Doc” Halliday. According to Gresham’s 1953 nonfiction book Monster Midway: An Uninhibited Look at the Glittering world of the Carny, Halliday regaled Gresham with stories of carnival life and its colorful characters-including the lowly geek, who horrified and thrilled audiences by eating live animals, notably chickens and snakes.

Geeks, according to Halliday, are made by desperate longing for a combination of alcohol, drugs, and a place to sleep. “The story of the geek haunted me,” wrote Gresham. “to get rid of it, I had to write it out.” At the start of his novel, Gresham shows young Stanton carlisle hanging back, “under the blaze of a naked light bulb,” as he watches the geek at a carnival-“a thin man who wore a suit of long underwear dyed chocolate brown,” with a black wig that “looked like a mop . . . The brown greasepaint on the emaciated face was streaked and smeared with the heat and rubbed off around the mouth.”

Carlisle, lean, blond, twenty-one, and fascinated by this spectacle, is thus initiated into the carny world, learning his tradecraft-and tradegraft-from the likes of the owner, Clem Hoately; Zeena the mind reader (