For his next film, Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro is doing something he's never done before.

He isn't including any supernatural or fantastical elements.

Del Toro's last movie was 2017's "Shape of Water," which won four Academy Awards including Best Picture. He's taken his time in choosing his next gig and it's going to "Nightmare Alley," an adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham's novel.

The book was previously adapted into a movie in 1947, which starred Tyrone Power as an ambitious young con-man who teams up with a female psychiatrist who is even more corrupt than he is. At first, they enjoy success fleecing people with their mentalist act, but then she turns the tables on him, out-manipulating the manipulator.

Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett are in talks to star.

In an interview with Collider, del Toro explained that he has always wanted to make a noir film.

"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," he said.

"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."

And when del Toro says "really dark," he means it. The director also teased that the movie will be rated R, a "big R. Double R!"