Step right up, folks! Let’s go to the circus!

The first trailer for Nightmare Alley, Guillermo del Toro’s highly-anticipated follow-up to 2018’s Best Picture Oscar winner Shape of Water, has dropped.

Per its official synopsis, the film follows an ambitious carny (Bradley Cooper) with a talent for manipulating people with a few well-chosen words hooks up with a female psychiatrist (Cate Blanchett) who is even more dangerous than he is.

Unlike his previous films, del Toro’s latest will not involve things not of this world. Speaking to Collider in 2019, he shared, “Now is the first chance I have to do a real underbelly of society type of movie. [There are] no supernatural elements. Just a straight, really dark story.”

How dark a story? Try R-rated dark. The film has been rated R for “strong/bloody violence, some sexual content, nudity and language”. Delicious!

Nightmare Alley, which del Toro adapted from William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel of the same name, also stars Willem Dafoe, Toni Collette, Richard Jenkins, Rooney Mara, and the Hellboy himself and del Toro regular Ron Perlman.

Watch the trailer here:Nightmare Alley opens in the US on Dec 17 and in Singapore on Jan 27, 2022.

Photo: Searchlight Pictures