Del Toro's Lovecraftian Movie Could've Been Extra Creepy, Here's CGI Test to Prove It
Once upon a time, Guillermo del Toro was working on a film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's 1931 novella At the Mountains of Madness.
The project's origins date back to 2006, and the plan was to make a big-budget R-rated horror film. At the Mountains of Madness tells the story of an Antarctic expedition that unearths almost unimaginably ancient ruins, and then realizes that inhuman creatures who once dwelt there in their multitudes are not quite extinct.
Both Tom Cruise and James Cameron were on board to produce, but ultimately the project failed. Several studios ended up passing on it, and del Toro's Lovecraftian dreams did not became reality. What, however, could have been, if they did?
Perhaps that would remain among the things man was not meant to know. But now we got a small glimpse of otherworldly horrors Guillermo del Toro wanted to bring on the big screen. He just used his recently launched Instagram account this week to share some CGI test footage from the project
Del Toro's caption goes: "All CGI test for a rig – ILM [Industrial Light & Magic] for At the Mountains of Madness (a decade ago) never-before-seen."
The footage runs 25-seconds long and, unsurprirsingly, shows an explorer in the titular mountains of madness getting killed and devoured by a tentacled horror. After all, visualizing "unspeakable horrors beyond human imagination" on screen usually means "tentacles".
Jokes aside, the CGI monster, which splits open to reveal a malformed humanoid torso within, indeed looks scary and can reasonably be described as "Lovecraftian". It certainly shows Guillermo del Toro's well-known knack for the creepy and the bizarre.
Recently Guillermo del Toro has again returned to using H.P. Lovecraft as a source of inspiration in his new Netflix series "Cabinet of Curiosities," which features two Lovecraft adaptations. A few of the other episodes, while not directly adapted from Lovecraft's stories, have distinct Lovecraftian atmosphere, particularly the Panos Cosmatos-directed The Viewing.
Maybe one day del Toro is going to revisit the Mountains of Madness. Certainly he still wishes to do so, and his newly established working relationship with Netflix might provide him an opportunity, as he noted in a recent conversation with The Kingcast podcast.
But, as he said, "the thing with Mountains is, the screenplay I co-wrote 15 years ago is not the screenplay I would do now, so I need to do a rewrite."