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Nightmare Alley
(2021)
Album Cover Art
Composed and Produced by:
Nathan Johnson

Conducted by:
John Mills

Orchestrated by:
John Ashton Thomas
Jeff Kryka
Geoff Lawson
Nicolas Charron
Jean-Pascal Beintus
Sylvain Morizet
Tommy Laurence
Sam Thompson
Labels Icon
LABEL & RELEASE DATE
Hollywood Records
(December 3rd, 2021)
Availability Icon
ALBUM AVAILABILITY
Commercial digital release only, with high resolution options at higher-than-usual prices.
Awards
AWARDS
None.
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ALSO SEE





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   Availability | Viewer Ratings | Comments | Track Listings | Notes
Buy it... if you can immerse yourself in an extremely deliberate, sparse, and intimate series of dissonant manipulations of one central theme.

Avoid it... if you expect this score to offer mystery, allure, or any engaging noir feeling whatsoever, Nathan Johnson's approach yielding little more than dissatisfaction and boredom.
Review Icon
EDITORIAL REVIEW
FILMTRACKS TRAFFIC RANK: #2,106
WRITTEN 12/8/21
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Nightmare Alley: (Nathan Johnson) Rather than look to the 1947 Tyrone Power film noir adaptation of the "Nightmare Alley" story by William Lindsay Gresham, writer and director Guillermo del Toro sought a new look at the original novel in 2021. It's a tale known for examining the grime and glamour of 1940s carnival culture, its hustlers, its extremely shady women, and the beauty of the setting at war with the shameless grifting of its shadowy characters. The lead of Nightmare Alley is Stan Carlisle, whose rise through the carnival scene is built upon his knack for wordplay and psychic manipulation. His talent unites with crooked psychologist Lilith Ritter to swindle a wealthy man of his fortune, and all goes to hell from there. Ultimately, it's a story of the rise and fall of a risk-taker, his total defeat exhibiting the due results of his criminal and moral depravity. It's the type of film that beckons with its sly acting performances and glitzy art direction, del Toro's involvement hinting at possible supernatural elements when in fact there are none. The pandemic of 2020 left the film half-finished for a year, and by the time production resumed, del Toro's returning collaborator for the film's score, Alexandre Desplat, had moved on. Fresh from his unexpected success for the mystery Knives Out, composer Nathan Johnson was hired to rush through the process of spotting, writing, and recording a score for Nightmare Alley in just four weeks. His unconventional style of writing is a decent match for the topic, and to bring his off-kilter ideas to life, he utilized a 65-piece orchestra and only one specialty instrument: an oversized air-conditioning grate rubbed to sound like a guiro gourd. Johnson confesses to being inspired by the performances of the principals in the film, and for their duplicitous characters, he approached the score with an intentional battle between alluring elegance and disruptive dissonance in mind. The ambience of the work is quite stark and deliberate, Johnson moving slowly and without much volume for most of it. There is a considerable amount of dissonance in Nightmare Alley by design, the composer frequently breaking chords or providing elegant lines of action in challenging discord with each other. After all, the setting of the story is gorgeous, but the characters themselves have no simple motivations, so the inaccessibility of the resulting work is fairly understandable. Even so, that doesn't make the score any measure of enjoyable.


Ratings Icon
VIEWER RATINGS
155 TOTAL VOTES
Average: 2.49 Stars
***** 10 5 Stars
**** 21 4 Stars
*** 40 3 Stars
** 48 2 Stars
* 36 1 Stars
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Track Listings Icon
TRACK LISTINGS
Total Time: 63:11
• 1. Man or Beast (3:28)
• 2. Storm's a Comin' (2:28)
• 3. Zeena's Spook Show (1:45)
• 4. A Steady Job (4:36)
• 5. The Face of God (2:58)
• 6. Open Graves (1:29)
• 7. Shoeflies (3:13)
• 8. Molly's Theme (1:08)
• 9. Copa Spook Show (2:06)
• 10. Stan Takes the Hook (2:19)
• 11. Lilith's Room (3:03)
• 12. Molly, Are You Alright? (0:37)
• 13. Reading Mrs. Kimball (2:40)
• 14. The Take (1:36)
• 15. Lie Detector (7:44)
• 16. Time You Delivered (2:43)
• 17. The Poison Apple (2:17)
• 18. Grindle's Ghost (7:13)
• 19. Lilith's Revenge (5:56)
• 20. Theme From Nightmare Alley - Solo Piano (3:52)

Notes Icon
NOTES AND QUOTES
There exists no official packaging for this album.
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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten
or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from Nightmare Alley are Copyright © 2021, Hollywood Records and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 12/8/21 (and not updated significantly since).
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