At any one time, Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro is attached to a multitude of projects in one form or another. Some of them get made, quite a few don’t, but whatever the case his attachment to a film certainly makes people take interest.

One such case is “Nightmare Alley,” a remake of the 1947 Tyrone Power-led noir film and a project which actually seems to be moving forward with a solid cast being locked in place including Bradley Cooper, Toni Collette, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Richard Jenkins, Willem Dafoe, Ron Perlman and Michael Shannon.

The story follows an ambitious young con-man who hooks up with a female psychiatrist even more corrupt than he is. At first, they enjoy success fleecing people with their mentalist act, but then she turns the table on him, out-manipulating the manipulator.

Speaking with Collider this week, del Toro was asked if he could tease anything about the project and he answered that it was the original William Lindsay Gresham 1946 novel that served as his main inspiration:

“Well what it is is that book was given to me in 1992 by Ron Perlman before I saw the Tyrone Power movie, 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.”

del Toro was also asked if the film would be rated R, to which he responded: “Yes, big R. Like, double R!”. The filmmaker is out doing press for “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” which he co-wrote and produced and opens in cinemas today. Check out a few recently released clips from that below.