Editorials
Noirvember: The Original ‘Nightmare Alley’ Spins a Haunting Tale of Deceit and Tragedy
The first adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham‘s 1946 novel is a bit of a genre-bending anomaly. Nightmare Alley featured a larger than usual budget for its type, a film noir that bleeds into other genres with a lead star intentionally playing against type. It centers around an unlikable protagonist haunted by his actions. Much of it is set against the backdrop of a carnival as complex as its lead. With Noirvember winding to a close and Guillermo del Toro‘s more faithful novel adaptation on the way, now makes for a perfect time to visit the 1947 gem.
Star Tyrone Power rose to fame in the ’30s and developed a reputation for playing romantic leads and swashbucklers, notably Zorro from The Mask of Zorro. Eventually, though, Power sought to break type and act outside of his usual wheelhouse. A fan of Gresham’s novel, Powers spent considerable effort convincing 20th Century Fox’s studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck to acquire rights and let him star as the unsavory Stanton Carlisle.
Nightmare Alley chronicles Stanton’s rise and fall as a con man, coming full circle in a seedy little traveling carnival. We meet Stan as the carnival barker, an outsider fascinated by this peculiar world, from the glitzy glamour of Electra to the pitiful geek, whom Stan deems inferior and low. Then Stanton sets his sights on Mademoiselle Zeena (Joan Blondell), a seer with one hell of a convincing act. Stan goes about wooing her, apprenticing her show, and learning her secrets for exploitive gain. One fatal accident and an uncovered love affair later, Stan’s exiled from the carnival. He uses Zeena’s trade secrets to create his own successful act in Chicago, catching the attention of a woman far more conniving and dangerous than he.
The hallmarks of film noir run through Nightmare Alley. The femme fatale, suspicion, and entrapment are all there in spades. Above all, it’s the fatalism that distinguishes this film as noir. Stan’s pursuit of fame and fortune gets underscored by his manipulative and often uncaring nature. He charms with ease but with a sense of superiority. Compared to the supporting characters, like the world-wearied Zeena or the kind-yet-naïve Molly (Coleen Gray), Stan’s a callous fool willing to use others to get ahead until it’s too late. He’s both likable and unlikable all at once.
The sole humanizing quality, outside of his relationship with Molly to an extent, is how haunted he gets by his own mistakes. A fatal error causes a death; Stan keeps it a secret, but it lingers like a ghost. His mistakes continue to compound and wear on him, dragging him to the depths of despair as he gives in to fear. There’s something haunting about the carnival, too, in the way many of the carnies are brow-beaten or realists; there’s no shiny American dream to achieve for them.
Director Edmund Goulding captures this highly complex world, highlighting all its beauty and ugliness simultaneously. The carnival and the affluent Chicago present a stark contrast, two very different playgrounds for Stanton to play his con game to diverging effects. These settings and the characters that inhabit them stretch the genre boundaries.
That Nightmare Alley was developed and released during the Hays Code era meant that screenwriter Jules Furthman needed to navigate the source material and extract the doom and pessimism without offending censors. In other words, this adaptation might be gorgeous and effective, but it didn’t reach the lows and darkness of the novel for poor Stanton.
That Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation seeks to be more faithful to Gresham’s novel likely means filling in the blanks that the 1947 film couldn’t. Regardless, 1947’s adaptation offers a unique glimpse at a bygone era of Hollywood and gave us a masterful performance by an actor purposefully seeking an unconventional part. Nightmare Alley‘s penchant for human darkness, deceit, and tragedy dabbles with drama and horror, just a tinge, offering an emotionally and visually complex gateway into film noir.
From child-eating witches to village-burning dragons, fairy tales have always had a foot in the horror genre. That’s why it makes sense that, for every The Hobbit and The Chronicles of Narnia, there are also darker and more adult-oriented stories about magical worlds inhabited by ravenous monsters and cruel villains.
Funnily enough, these sinister tales were precisely the ones that I gravitated towards back when I was a kid, and I was reminded of this while watching Netflix’s recently released I Am Frankelda, Mexico’s first ever feature-length stop-motion animation and one hell of an entertaining parable about the intersection between fiction and reality.
In honor of this special kind of horror-adjacent fairy tale, today I’d like to share this list recommending six Dark Fantasy films that horror fans might enjoy.
For the purposes of this list, we’ll be defining Dark Fantasy as fantastical stories that don’t shy away from the more macabre elements that fuel classic fairy tales. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own grim favorites if you think we missed a particularly thrilling one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
6. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)
I’m fascinated by bizarre attempts at blockbuster filmmaking – especially when the resulting movies are somehow still fun despite their corporate-mandated origins. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is precisely one of these strangely compelling studio projects, as this surprisingly successful action-thriller boasts a lot of heart (and tongue-in-cheek humor) for a CGI-heavy creature feature.
Directed by Dead Snow’s Tommy Wirkola, Witch Hunters re-frames the classic fairy tale as an origin story for a duo of badass monster-slayers. Of course, it’s the flick’s anachronistic aesthetic and overall visual flair that make it stand out from other action-horror endeavors from around the same time.
5. The Wolf House (2018)
Made in the tradition of faux cursed films in the same vein as Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made, the eerie backstory to 2018’s Chilean animated flick The Wolf House (La Casa Lobo in the original Spanish) already makes it a nightmarish experience before the flick even really begins.
After all, the movie is presented to us as a faux propaganda film produced by the leader of a death cult (heavily inspired by the real life Colonia Dignidad), with this hybrid animated feature using complex movie magic to simulate a single uninterrupted shot as it tells the story of a lazy young girl who runs away from an isolated colony and encounters a creepy old house in the woods.
4. The Brothers Grimm (2005)
Out of all the Monty Python alumni, Terry Gilliam has had the most interesting career outside of the original comedy group. From fascinating canceled projects (such as his scrapped adaptation of Watchmen) to dystopian parodies that feel more relevant by the minute (1985’s Brazil), even his “lesser” films are still intriguing in their own way.
2005’s The Brothers Grimm is one such project, with this peculiar movie attempting to combine the comedian-turned-filmmaker’s unique visual style with a more blockbuster-oriented plot reimagining the titular brothers as con-artists rather than mere writers. The end result isn’t exactly a masterpiece, but it’s still a legitimately fun ride with plenty of memorable monsters and wonderful performances by both the late, great Heath Ledger and Matt Damon.
3. Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic (2010)
2010’s Dante’s Inferno game may have a reputation as something of an unapologetic God of War clone, but I’d argue that the now-obscure game was aesthetically unique enough to deserve a bigger fanbase. However, while the title remains trapped on the seventh console generation, its highly underrated anime adaptation is a lot easier to get a hold of!
Animated by 6 different studios in order to make the 9 circles of hell feel unique from each other, this may not be a completely faithful adaptation of Dante Alighieri’s poem, but it’s still one heck of a great (not to mention gory) time that I’d highly recommend to fans of Netflix’s take on Castlevania.
2. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009)
My personal favorite entry in the Underworld franchise, Rise of the Lycans, is a highly ambitious prequel that actually works better if you haven’t had the story spoiled to you by the previous Underworld films.
While the rest of the series features plenty of urban fantasy elements as the movies combine machine guns and modern environments with gothic storytelling, Patrick Tatopoulos’ prequel fully embraces its fantastical origins and tells a classic tale about a doomed romance between a werewolf and a vampire amid a medieval uprising.
And the best part is that we get a lot more Michael Sheen as the fan-favorite Lucian.
1. Solomon Kane (2011)
One of my personal favorite movies on this list, MJ Basset’s criminally underseen adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s other iconic warrior is thoroughly steeped in horror ambience and features plenty of memorable monsters. However, it’s also a classic origin story for a swashbuckling hero that wouldn’t feel out of place in a tabletop RPG.
While I’ve already written about how the film deftly combines both horror and fantasy elements without breaking the bank, I’ll never pass up an opportunity to recommend the bizarre movie where James Purefoy expertly plays a puritan John Wick.
It’s just too bad that we never got the other films in this intended trilogy.
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