Guillermo del Toro’s American Dream turned into a nightmare.

Guillermo del Toro has two smiles.

The first is the type of open-mouthed mid-laugh, teeth displaying, 100-watt smile that you associate with childhood. When your enthusiasm about everything is pure and unrestrained, this is the one. You will often see this smile if you spend any time with the Oscar-winning Mexican filmmaker at 57 years old. It’s there when the chef-owner of a Toronto restaurant is telling him about the secret, off-the-menu specials of the evening, or when del Toro remembers catching a rare pre-Code 1930s movie late one night on TV, or when he’s recommending some obscure 19th-century horror author who you just You can find it hereIt’s easy to read. It’s probably the smile del Toro has when he’s on set; it definitely there when he’s gently issuing orders to his postproduction team behind a mixing board (“That thunder needs to go up two decibels on the left, the footsteps down a decibel on the right”Click on the () to make everything appear exactly as he imagined.

But there’s a second del Toro smile that occasionally comes out, one that you’d be tempted to describe as wistful if that didn’t make it seem light. Although his lips are tightening, the corners of del Toro’s mouth point upwards. It’s a smile with a shadow lurking over it. It’s a heavy grin. That’s the look he gets when he talks about the last four years, which were marked with love and death, some extreme highs and several subterranean lows. Del Toro was in the middle of a new chapter. He was also looking around and seeing a lot more despair.

“I’ve jokingly said every movie I make is a biography,”He said. “But I actually do mean that. When I did The Shape of Water, I wanted to make it a love song. I wanted to sing it in a way that was an affirmation of life. And then, it’s like…”

Del Toro puts both his elbows on the tables and leans in. “You know what the flip side of the American dream is, right? It’s a nightmare. I felt a complete sense of doom. So, when people ask, ‘Well, what about your new one?’ It was: This is where I was at.”

Say what you will about the perverse pleasures of del Toro’s new film, Nightmare Alley: It is absolutely Not a love song. An adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 cult novel which hits theaters on December 17th, it follows Stanton Carlisle (played by Bradley Cooper), a man on the run who takes up with a traveling carnival. An old husband-and wife team teaches him the tricks of the mentalist trade. It turns out that Stanton has a knack for reading people — not to mention manipulating them with words, wish-fulfillment promises, and the ability to “find out what they fear, then sell that back to them.”Soon, he turns his talents into nightclub entertainment and is able to bilk the wealthy. He also meets a femme fatale psychiatrist (Cate Blanchett, in jungle-cat mode), who has no qualms about passing on her rich clients’ personal information to him in the name of mutually beneficial scams. Carlisle’s assistant and romantic interest, a former fellow carny named Molly (Rooney Mara), begs him not to turn their smoke-and-mirrors meal ticket into a “spook show.” Stanton doesn’t listen. It’s not a spoiler to say things don’t end well.

It’s a film with an A-list cast — which also includes Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, and David Strathairn — a prime awards-season release, and a production design that recreates both 1940s Americana and Art Deco interiors with a painter’s eye. (Del Toro claims that he was inspired by the film. Nightmare‘s noirish look, in fact, from midcentury painters such as Edward Hopper, Thomas Hart Benton, and George Tooker.) It’It’s also a dark, seedy film that prefers to walk on a darker side of the street. Not even Carlisle’s occasionally dangled promise for a better future with his lady love can stop a bone-deep feeling of pessimism leaking in. “You don’t fool people, Stan,”An actor declares at one moment. “They fool themselves.” The most sympathetic character is arguably the carnival’s resident sideshow geek, who bites the heads off of chickens for his daily bottle of hooch.

But del Toro’s take on a world gone mad with greed and corruption feels very much like a product of the last few years; retro-stylized or not, Nightmare Alley’s ecosphere of con artists and narcissistic grifters makes it feel like one of the first movies to genuinely reflect the Trump era. It also marks a serious break from the writer-director’s usual supernatural thrillers, exquisite fantasies and portraits of beautiful monsters, which peaked when his 2017 fish-man-meets-woman romance The Shape of WaterThe film won four Oscars including Best Director and Best Picture. A deformed fetus, named Enoch, who is found in a jar with a large eyeball and a split forehead, is the closest thing to a del Toro touch of macabre. “Had I made this earlier in my career,” del Toro jokes, “the baby probably would have been the hero.”

You can easily picture the kid from Guadalajara who taught himself English just so he could read Hollywood horror-movie magazines, who asked for a mandrake root for Christmas (all the better to practice black magic, he told his parents), who would read his father’s health textbooks and declare that he had every malady — trichinosis, cirrhosis, a brain hemorrhage — known to man, and who was “raised in a very morbid Catholicism,”He wrote intricate stories about the baby eyeball in the jar and kept his notebooks. Imagine the teenager del Toro being traumatized by the violence he saw growing up and seeking refuge in Super 8 films about the carny menagerie. Or, later, when real-life criminals kidnapped his dad in 1998 and threatened him with death over 72 days. Freak shows have been his comfort zone, whether he was starting his own creatures-features makeup/special-effects company Necropia or including a life-size replica of a character from the cult film FreaksIn one of his three “Bleak House”Personal museums. This self-described misfit has always had a place to call home, thanks to so-called disreputable artwork.

In other words, it’s not hard to see del Toro, a man who never met a monster he didn’t love or identify with, pairing Enoch eye-to-eye with his iconic “Pale Man”The 2006 crossover hit “Creator” features his creature character Pan’s LabyrinthIn a creepy-crawly buddy comedy. But when it came to processing everything he’d seen happening in America and what he’d been through over the last few years, he knew he needed to focus more on reckoning with the beast within. “I always say, ‘Yeah, I make movies with monsters,’” del Toro admits, his smile tightening. “‘But the worst monsters in them are the humans.’”

Del Toro firstYou may have heard about it Nightmare Alley back in the early 1990s, after he’d already had a few TV directing gigs in Mexico under his belt and was looking to get his first feature off the ground. CronosHis 1993 debut film, “The Vampire Hunter”, was just about to be made. It is about a mysterious object that transforms an antiques dealer into one. It could have been completed and was on tour at festivals. This established del Toro’s reputation as a young filmmaker who loves to mix religious iconography, regional mythology and slightly modified horror tropes. Neither he nor Ron Perlman, the actor he’d cast in CronoHe became a friend and long-time collaborator and can still recall exactly when the pitch took place.

“All of my recollections about everything that’s happened between him and me are completely different from his,”Perlman laughs. “But the way I remember it, we were having dinner together, and I was on my high horse, saying that remakes are an act of cowardice. It’s lazy to remake something, especially if the movie is a masterpiece.

“‘Having said that, Guillermo,’”He recounted saying, “’there is one movie that should be remade, and that’s Nightmare Alley. Not only should it be remade, but it should be done by somebody who understands there’s both a man and a monster at the center of it.’” Perlman had been wanting to play a larger-than-life Elmer Gantry-type, and he felt the role of a carny-turned-celebrity was perfect.

Intrigued, del Toro managed to track down a copy of the 1947 movie, a near-impossibility at the time — the film was at the center of a bitter dispute between its producer, George Jessel, and its star, Tyrone Power, who’d both convinced 20th Century Fox head Darryl Zanuck to purchase the rights to the novel, and the studio. To say the public had recoiled from the movie’s bleak, sleazy view of a world populated by flimflam men, rubes and outcasts would be an understatement; it was considered too fatalistic even for a noir, and rights issues had mostly kept it buried. Perlman said he first saw it at 3 a.m. in his childhood. It quickly became a cult film and del Toro was a card-carrying member of the cult.

“You know what the flip side of the American dream is? It’s a nightmare. I felt a complete sense of doom. So, when people ask, ‘Well, what about your new one?’ This is where I was at.—Guillermo del Toro”

Del Toro also tracked down Gresham’s novel, which came with its own torrid backstory: The author had been drinking with a man he knew in Spain, right after the country’s civil war, when his companion regaled him with tales of carnival geeks and the depths an alcoholic sad sack would sink to in the name of addiction. Gresham was haunted by the tale and wrote a book about it. Nightmare AlleyIt is a kind of exorcism. The story also included several personal obsessions, such as tarot-card reading and psychoanalysis. The book was briefly banned. Many editions of the book would be severely censored. Gresham would eventually take his own life at age 53, in one of the Manhattan hotels where he’d worked on the novel.

The filmmaker found the movie’s source material and Gresham’s story to be as deeply moving as it was disturbing. And having learned to read tarot cards as a kid in Mexico, del Toro shared the writer’s fascination with readings, “though they actually scared me. I don’t advocate it being magical, but I do advocate that there’s a connection between the cards and your subconscious.” (“I’ve also been to therapy,”He added: “and that can be great and terrifying.”) When he started to make inquiries about adapting it, however, he immediately ran into obstacles. Fox wasn’t interested in a remake. It was still tangled in legal issues. “And,” del Toro says, “no one knew who I was yet.”

He made a new career and became a comic book fanatic. Frankenstein,Things that go bump in your mind into a critically acclaimed filmmaker. 2001: His ghost story The Devil’s Backbone2006. The fairy tale Pan’s Labyrinth,Both films were made during the Spanish Civil War. His unique ability to combine the supernatural, the fantastic, the folkloric and the horrible was evident. He made a Marvel movie (Blade II) long before it was fashionable. His omnivorous taste was a great fit for the so-called “disreputable”Pop art is everything from Gothic romances (Crimson Peak) to giant-robots-vs.-monsters movies (Pacific Rim). He’d add producer and published novelist to his resume.

And Nightmare Alley languished on the wish list in the back of del Toro’s crowded brain. He was unable to believe his luck until he met another person who realized how wonderful it would be for him to do it.

According to Del ToroHis 30-year-old marriage was ending as he was finishing up his love song. Del Toro and Lorenza Newton met while they were at college in Guadalajara. They were married in 1986. Having parented two daughters and shared three decades of history with Newton, he’s extremely selective in what he’s willing to say on the matter. The second smile is present and well-accounted for. “I feel like I have permission to talk about myself,”He chooses his words carefully. “But . . . I don’t think I have the right to talk about anybody else. Sometimes your own history involves the history of other people.”

The couple formally separated around March 2017 and finalized their divorce that September, three months before the film’s release. “I can say this, because I have a good friendship with my ex-wife,” del Toro says, “but I was a homebody, and then, suddenly, that changed. Without qualifying anything . . . the important break was with myself, saying, ‘This is not all I am.’ I always believe that in life, you experience what you need. Maybe not what you want. But what you need.”

Del Toro also brought a date with him to the Oscars in March 2012. The filmmaker spoke out about his experiences as an immigrant and how art can erase borders when his name was announced to be the winner of the Best Director Award. He also thanked “Kimmy” — veteran film writer Kim Morgan, the date who’d caused a stir on the red carpet. Del Toro had reached out to Morgan several months prior to compliment a piece she’d written. “It was either something about Badlands or Barry Lyndon,” Morgan says. “Those are both movies we love a lot.”

They began to correspond, and when del Toro discovered she lived in Los Angeles they decided to meet up downtown at the Last Bookstore. “We started talking about books that we liked,”He said. “She said, ‘Have you read Essays on American Literature by D.H. Lawrence?’ And I said, ‘Have you seen this particular book of designs?’ We had an intersection with literature that was pretty dark.”Both were amazed at the fact that the other was able to recognize and communicate with them. Nightmare Alley — the film and the book — but also were equally crazy about it.

They had been together since December and were now in a committed relationship. They had been discussing the possibility of working together on a project. Kim asked, “What about Nightmare Alley?”Now Del Toro was allowed to film at Fox and the film had finally been given its due. It would also help him channel what he was seeing happen in a country he’d long called home, where a blatantly racist president was calling Mexicans “rapists”And to stoke the flames for hate.

“As a Mexican man, I felt particularly vulnerable,” del Toro says. “I woke up every morning saying, ‘What is going to be the headline today? Are we at war?’ I mean, for a lot of those four years, I felt like I was under a dark cloud. There’s a line in Nightmare we ended up cutting: ‘I know when there’s a right and I know there’s a wrong, and I see a lot of one and none of the other.’” That’s where I was at.”

He is silent and then adds. “I feel that the only thing I have learned since I was a kid is that I talk about the things that I hope for the most or scare me the most. I’m not a postmodern filmmaker; I’m sincere in what I do. I’m always a little too emotionally entangled in what I do as well, but that’s the only way I know how to purge or handle things. If I didn’t believe in the tragic dimension of Nightmare Alley, I couldn’t have tried to make it.”

Morgan and del Toro already had a draft in hand when they met at the Oscars. He’d been recognized by the Academy, gone public with a new romance and had found a project that he could use as a vehicle to get a sense of despair out of his system. And then, shortly after the ceremony, del Toro’s father died.

The filmmaker has long talked about the huge role his father had played in his life, how he’d inherited his dad’s hypochondria as a kid, and how, during his dad’s long trips to Houston to get checked out by doctors, he’d bring the young Guillermo to translate and reward him by buying him “a $100 bucks’ worth”The popularity of comic books. He’s also spoken of his experience when his father was abducted and having to pay the ransom in order to save his life. Guillermo, the older del Toro, and his son were close and Guillermo was there when his father died. He admits that it was a life-changing event.

“Because it’s one thing to think about your father dying, and another thing to experience it,” del Toro says. “When you find yourself fatherless in the world, you reflect on what it means for you to be a father, a son — a man. How do you express loss through your actions? It the same question I’ve been asking since doing Hellboy: What makes a man a gentleman? How do they start? What happens at the end? We were struggling with this in the beginning. Nightmare, too.

“But the urgency for that answer increased after my dad went,”He notes. “And the answer is, there is no answer.”

Del Toro decided to not be nihilistic and instead found that this idea gave him hope. Your time here is yours, and it’s not your time elsewhere. Only you can control your behavior and how you interact with others. It’s why he could make a movie about a man who eventually accepts his fate while, offscreen, trying to change his own. It’s partly why del Toro decided after years of being isolated to be more social. He now enjoys spending hours talking with fellow filmmakers about their craft and goes out with them more often, something he had never done before. It’s why, after years of throwing himself into his work because “I don’t do well with rest,” he’s trying to enjoy nonwork things a little more. “I’m really intrigued by life now, in a way that I haven’t been the rest of my life.”Morgan and del Toro were quietly married in May 2021.

It’s also partially why he decided to see if he could change his filmmaking style going into Nightmare. You can still find formal flourishes galore (count how many times you see Stanton framed within circles) and the occasional homage (if you can’t place why that carnival’s entry looks somewhat familiar, you may want to revisit Strangers in Trains). But del Toro’s unofficial mantra for what could have been a pulp-fiction-by-numbers was: “I want to do what I don’t do. I wanted to change my instincts as a filmmaker. Could I move the camera without being intrusive? Or not do beauty that looks self-consciously ‘beautiful,’ and do murkiness and grime without over-directing it?”

You can also make a film that explores the depths of the way Nightmare AlleyIt does so by channeling a sense of cynicism, but not giving in completely. “It’s not a cynical movie,”He corrects me, he says. “It’s dark. It’s a little bleak. But it’s not a movie that’s cruel for cruelty’s sake. I don’t think Gresham’s novel is like that. Gresham, I don’t think so. It is Stanton. We used to say that the story was a biopic of Gresham’s soul. We didn’t want to remake the original movie, but we did want to make something that he would have seen and said, ‘Oh, you get it.’ I mean, there’s a sense of melancholy in Pan’s Labyrinth, but there’s also magic in it, and a lump in your throat by the end of it.

“There is no lump in your throat at the end of this one,”He keeps going with a laugh. “The thing is, you have to be detached to be cynical. I can’t be cynical anymore. I wanted to go for something closer to a broken romanticism.”

Del Toro then smiles that first smile that exudes joy and deep sense of happiness. It makes you believe that whatever was damaged while he was filming this movie may have been repaired along the way.