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.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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