How newly married Guillermo del Toro and Kim Morgan found the dark heart of 'Nightmare Alley'
LOS ANGELES — Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro's last movie, "The Shape of Water," was a box-office hit that won four Academy Awards, including director and best picture. The film was a delicate, delightfully weird love story between a cleaning woman and a fish-man kept at a top-secret government facility. His follow-up, "Nightmare Alley," is a bleak tale of carnies, grifters and a dishonest society that creates a far more despairing portrait of the world.
With a similar visual style to Del Toro's previous work, beautifully lit and finely crafted, "Nightmare Alley" steers the veteran filmmaker into new territory. The departure includes the fact that Del Toro co-wrote the screenplay with film journalist and historian (and new wife) Kim Morgan.
"When 'Shape of Water' came, it was responding to a completely different series of impulses," said Del Toro. "But by the end of that campaign and at the end of the process with the movie, the world was in an almost epistemological crisis about truth and lies and populist discourse and how to distinguish a system of reality that just reinforces what you believe and that doesn't challenge you into seeing the world. And these were things that were very
