Guillermo del Toro Talks Lovecraft – ‘Mountains Of Madness’

Out with Tolkien, in with Lovecraft? Guillermo del Toro talks about an adaptation of At The Mountains Of Madness…
With Guillermo del Toro’s directing duties on The Hobbit now out of the question due to scheduling issues, one question immediately arises: what project will take its place?

One possibility is another book adaptation, this time H. P. Lovecraft’s icy 1931 novella, At The Mountains Of Madness. It’s a film del Toro has been expressing an interest for at least three years. In a 2007 interview with First Showing, the director said, “If I had the freedom to choose and the chance to hold it until its done, I’d do Mountains right away.”

Earlier this week, Aint It Cool News caught up with the director for a lengthy discussion about his current project, SF horror Splice, a film on which he’s producer, with Vincenzo Natali directing. Towards the end of the interview, meanwhile, del Toro once again expressed his enthusiasm for getting a Mountains Of Madness adaptation off the ground.

“Mountains is exactly the movie I would like to do,” del Toro said. “It would push buttons, and it’s extreme in many areas. It’s a hard R-rated, big production tentpole in the genre of horror. What I love about tentpole horror – which is not done much anymore, if at all – is that there was a time when you could see something like Alien or The Shining or The Thing. Movies that came not as a B-movie product of a studio, but as an A, tentpole, big release, high-end production like The Exorcist, and so on and so forth.”

Del Toro’s reference to The Thing is an interesting one. Not only did John Carpenter’s 1982 display echoes of H. P. Lovecraft’s story – both are set among the frozen wastelands of the Antarctic, with desperate men fighting off hideous, tentacled monsters – The Thing was also one of the bloodiest Hollywood studio pictures released at that point. The adaptation of Mountains, del Toro suggests, would be no different.

“What I would love with Mountains is for it to have all the lustre and the scope of a tentpole horror movie, but be R-rated,” the director continued. “Not because I want to do gore for gore’s sake, but because it is a very adult movie, and the consequences of things are really deep and disturbing. Hopefully, one day, I will have the clout to do it.”

A fusion of Lovecraft’s chilly Cthulhu story and del Toro’s often spectacular visual imagination sounds, to us, like the perfect coupling, particularly with the kind of budget the director is hoping to acquire. We just hope he can get the go-ahead for the film soon. More Mountains news as we get it.

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