Guillermo del Toro has gone from a cult-favorite director (for his phantasmagoric horror films like The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth) to the maker of stellar franchise films (Blade 2, his Hellboy movies), to Oscar winner (for his creature-feature love story The Shape of Water). His latest film, the fantastic Nightmare Alley, failed to find an audience in theaters, but is now streaming on various platforms.
Nightmare Alley is the latest in a long line of genre-blurring neo-noirs. Let’s take a look at some of the movies that cleared some ground for del Toro. From a pulpy, horror-laden private eye story to a large-scale therapeutic experiment gone horribly wrong, these films play in the same warped funhouse as del Toro’s masterpiece.
Here are 9 neo-noirs to watch after Nightmare Alley‘s twisted ride.
Table of Contents
Shutter Island (2010)
Martin Scorsese‘s adaptation of Gone Baby Gone author Dennis Lehane‘s pulpy potboiler is one of the most elaborate films of his career. Shutter Island follows Teddy (Leonardo DiCaprio), a detective who with his partner (Mark Ruffalo) investigates the disappearance of a mental patient from an asylum on the titular isolated island. Things spiral well out of control, leading Teddy into a maze of conspiracy and madness.
Known for his critically-acclaimed prestige pictures, Scorcese also tends to drop A-list stars into what is essentially B-movie material (see The Departed). Shutter Island is Scorsese’s extended ode to mind-bending B-movie genre flicks like Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor and John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, but shot through with an earnest attempt to explore the extreme effects trauma can have on someone’s psyche.
Lost Highway (1997)
The name David Lynch is synonymous with a kind of film that cannot be easily slotted into any particular genre. For the purpose of this article, “neo-noir” will work. Co-written by pulp author Barry Gifford, Lost Highway follows jazz sax player Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), who seems haunted by paranoia. After he and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) receive videotapes of themselves sleeping, Fred watches one depicting Renee dismembered in their bed. He’s suddenly convicted of her murder and while in prison, he somehow transforms into a young mechanic named Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), who is released. Pete then becomes involved with a femme fatale named Alice Wakefield, who is Renee’s exact double (also played by Arquette).
Lost Highway is unabashedly bizarre, setting up a central mystery which, in true Lynchian fashion, is not only never solved, but never clearly defined. Is the whole movie a metaphoric exploration of the psychic toll of deep paranoia? Co-writer Gifford wrote the novel Wild at Heart, which Lynch adapted to the hilt in 1990. That film had something resembling a coherent plot, but Lost Highway is about mood, texture, and pervasive dread, memorably personified by mob boss Dick Laurent (Robert Loggia) and his pal, Robert Blake’s ghoul-faced (and interdimensional?) Mystery Man.
After Dark, My Sweet (1990)
Glengarry Glen Ross director James Foley‘s near-forgotten 1990 neo-noir adapts the novel by Jim Thompson (The Grifters), about a boxer turned drifter who stumbles into a kidnapping plot. Collie (Jason Patric) wanders into a small town and immediately rubs everyone the wrong way. He meets an alcoholic widow named Fay (Rachel Ward), and is drawn into the orbit of Uncle Bud (Bruce Dern), whose delusions of grandeur revolve around an inane scheme to kidnap the son of a local rich man and hold him for ransom.
Foley brings a sense of impending doom to his neo-noir, set in a seedy nowheresville bordering the Southern California desert. Uncle Bud’s kidnapping plot would have evaporated along with a million other get-rich-quick ideas if not for Collie, who we learn fought one too many boxing matches. He is quiet, smoldering, and deeply dangerous, an antihero who brings out disastrous impulses in other people. Nightmare Alley’s Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) comes off as a more ambitious version of Collie, making After Dark, My Sweet a spiritual cousin to del Toro’s more fantastical neo-noir.
Mulholland Drive (2001)
David Lynch burrows under Tinseltown’s surface in this puzzle box of a neo-noir, which on the surface can be summed up thusly: fresh-faced actress Betty (Naomi Watts), starts an affair with an amnesiac calling herself “Rita” (Laura Elena Harring) while trying to discover Rita’s identity. In high Lynchian style, the movie shifts completely halfway through, as the actresses change identities and the audience is left wondering which half of the movie was “real” and which was some kind of dreamscape.
Mulholland Drive was originally shot as a TV pilot, but when no one picked it up, Lynch shot additional material to make it a feature. The result is a confounding movie full of plot threads which go nowhere, but it’s nevertheless fiendishly entertaining. Mulholland Drive aligns with the mystery element of many noirs, but veers off into surreal, nightmare territory. Multiple rewatches may not yield any more clues (despite the assertion of various internet sleuths), but being so confounded is rarely this fun.
Memento (2000)
Tenet and The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan’s second feature famously runs backwards, as former insurance investigator Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) hunts for the man who attacked him before raping and murdering his wife. Leonard cannot create new memories, and so relies on the tattoos covering his body, each of them containing another “fact” about his condition and past. As the audience follows Leonard from the “end” of the story back to the “beginning,” we learn just how easily Leonard can be manipulated, even by his own hand.
In Memento, Nolan deconstructs the genre by giving us a character who is as relentless as any other film noir anti-hero, but must make quick leaps of logic almost every fifteen minutes. Leonard’s past is idealized, and perhaps wholly imaginary. Many neo-noirs play with the concept of memory, but Nolan puts questions of the reliability of memory at the center of Memento. It remains a haunting look at the stories we tell ourselves, and the power of grief over logic.
Blue Velvet (1986)
After a surreal cult horror film (Eraserhead), a critically-acclaimed, unflinchingly grotesque biopic (The Elephant Man), and an epic, big-budget misfire (the original 1984 Dune), director David Lynch used Blue Velvet to peel back the glossy skin of Reagan’s America and reveal the truly demented secrets squirming around beneath. College student Jeffrey (Kyle Maclachlan) meets Sandy, an innocent girl-next-door type (Laura Dern), before falling in with a dangerous crowd of criminals and lunatics after finding a severed ear in a field near his parents’ home.
Blue Velvet is famous for a terrific, prototypical Dennis Hopper performance as the insane Frank Booth, and for the great Isabella Rosselini’s heartbreaking turn as a deeply damaged nightclub singer who draws Jeffrey into her surreal world of crime and S&M. Blue Velvet is less surreal than Lynch’s later films, and is possibly the most noir of them all, as it examines how easily a good college boy like Jeffrey can embrace his dark side.
Dark City (1998)
I, Robot director Alex Proyas got the jump on The Matrix by a year with Dark City, a sci-fi neo-noir about a man who discovers that the world around him has been consistently manipulated by a mysterious, inhuman collective. While the Wachowskis relied on an amped-up vision of the future, Proyas took a stylized approach to noir tropes of the past. “John Murdoch” (Rufus Sewell) navigates the endless night of his city, meeting a tragic lounge singer (Jennifer Connoly) as he runs from an accordion-playing detective (William Hurt) who suspects him in a string of gruesome murders.
The Matrix was the blockbuster hit of the time, but the strange, compelling Dark City has perhaps aged better. As Murdoch discovers the true nature of his reality (manipulation by aliens in black trench coats and matching fedoras), he develops powers similar to The Matrix’s Neo. Dark City explores similar questions about the nature of our reality, but comes to a less didactic and more heartfelt conclusion.
Lord of Illusions (1995)
New York private detective Harry D’Amour (Scott Bakula) is often drawn into strange paranormal and supernatural cases. He takes a routine insurance fraud assignment in Los Angeles as a way to shake off a disturbing exorcism. Harry falls into the orbit of a superstar illusionist called Swann (Kevin J. O’Connor), his wife Dorothea (Famke Janssen), and the deranged Butterfield (J. Trevor Edmond), the remnant of a group of cultists who followed the evil sorcerer Nix. Harry must find a way to stop the cultists from resurrecting Nix (Daniel von Bargen), who called himself “The Puritan.”
As a film noir, Lord of Illusions will never be mistaken for Chinatown; when it comes to body horror, writer-director Clive Barker is no David Cronenberg. Still, Barker adapts his short story “The Last Illusion” as a pulpy, entertaining freakfest. Barker knows how to toe the line between camp and horror, with Bakula (in one of his few movie appearances) selling the movie’s more outlandish elements with an admirably committed performance. Barker wrote several other Harry D’Amour stories, and it’s a shame he hasn’t directed anything since this entry. Barker was infusing horror with queer sensibilities long before, say, American Horror Story, and his embrace of the fantastic makes his horror unlike anyone else’s.
Angel Heart (1987)
Angel Heart is possibly the darkest supernatural neo-noir of the ‘80s. It’s 1955, and New York City private eye Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) is hired by the mysterious Louis Cyphre (Robert DeNiro) to track down a vanished crooner named Johnny Favorite. Johnny skipped town without paying Cyphre some unspecified debt, and if you say the words “Louis Cyphre” fast enough, you’ll guess enough of the plot to keep you going until things get extremely weird.
Writer-director Alan Parker channels Gothic horror and occultism into a truly gruesome and disturbing neo-noir horror flick. Angel Heart’s final reveal may strain logic and credulity, but it contains some truly shocking details. Parker, a director capable of switching genres without breaking a sweat, also helmed Midnight Express and Pink Floyd — The Wall. His daring in Angel Heart was so controversial that it became a factor in Lisa Bonet leaving her role on The Cosby Show. It remains a compelling outlier in the neo-noir genre for its explicit gore and explicit sexuality.
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