Don’t Mess With Magicians in the Official Trailer for Nightmare Alley

A few months ago, a teaser trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, gave us a quick first look into his newest, mystical creation. It also left fans desperately wanting more. Luckily, now we’ve got our hands on an official trailer, and it’s giving us a wealth of reasons to be excited.

The film follows Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) who stumbles upon a travelling carnival and meets a peculiar couple: Zeena (Toni Collette) and her retired magician husband Pete (David Strathairn).Thanks to his strange new friends, Stanton gains enough knowledge to scam the New York upper-class, but, unsurprisingly, makes some powerful enemies along the way. Also in the cast are Richard Jenkins, Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Toni Collette, Ron Perlman, Rooney Mara, Holt McCallany, Clifton Collins Jr., Tim Blake Nelson, Mary Steenburgen, and David Strathairn.

The Searchlight-produced film is based on a 1946 novel of the same name by William Lindsay Gresham, which was made into a movie directed by Edmund Goulding the year after its release. Speaking with Collider, del Toro touched on his decision to adapt the book.

“What it is is that book was given to me in 1992 by Ron Perlman before I saw the Tyrone Power movie,” he explained, “and I loved the book. My adaptation that I’ve done with [co-writer] Kim Morgan is not necessarily—the entire book is impossible, it’s a saga. But there are elements that are darker in the book, and it’s the first chance I have—in my short films I wanted to do noir. It was horror and noir. And 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.”

Check out the official trailer here:

The trailer niftily cuts between Stanton taking a lie detector test, and him doing… not so great things, things that probably put him in that position in the first place. We have a flash of him strangling someone. And we have him running down a hallway with blood on his hands (literally). Our beloved Bradley Cooper is clearly up to no good, and I, for one, am here for it.

Nightmare Alley hits theaters on December 17.