“Nightmares are a bad habit…. But a good creative force.”
—Jorge Luis Borges
If Diane Arbus and Otto Preminger had had a love child, it would be the 1946 novel Nightmare Alley. A dark masterpiece by a little-known writer named William Lindsay Gresham, the book spawned an early film version, starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell. Now, 75 years after the novel first appeared, Guillermo del Toro has given us a deeper and more faithful adaptation of Gresham’s disturbing look at carny life, hucksters, and confidence scams.
