At the Mountain of Madness is an HP Lovecraft horror novel originally published in 1936. The book is about a group of explorers in Antartica who stumble onto a group of creatures called “Elder Things” and what comes after that is terror after terror.
Fantasy master Guillermo Del Toro has been attached to this project since leaving The Hobbit and is well on his way to getting to work on it, however even he admits its not officially greenlit. Ramascreen quotes Guillermo Del Toro:
We are not green lit, we are still budgeting and designing, and we are partners on this. I believe in my heart we are going to be making this movie in June of next year. We are budgeting the creatures and met with Spectral Motion and ILM, where Dennis Muren told me the sweetest words ever when he said, no one has ever seen monsters like this. That was truly one of the highlights of my fat life, a demigod like Muren saying that.
The film promises to use cutting edge Fusion 3D cameras, and when asked about just how Del Toro plans on handling the creatures of this film and answered with this:
The way the creatures are rendered and done is going to bring forth an aspect of Lovecraft that has not been done on live action films. Part of my speech was, I’m putting all the chips I have accumulated in 20 years as a director, betting them on a single number. This is not just a movie and then move on to the next. It’s do or die time for me. Cameron does his movies like that every time and I find it surprising the way people judge success in retrospect, like, of course, I would have done that. Avatar was the largest gamble, again, so were Titanic and Terminator 2. I love that type of filmmaker, with those gigantic stainless steel balls, Alec Baldwin-style in Glengarry Glen Ross, fucking clanking together.
I can really respect that gigantic stainless steels balls approach. I often wonder if some of these big name directors are slicing up their best ideas to serve in portions to carry them throughout their careers, picking and choosing from their well of innovations to spread out over different projects. Del Toro plans to open the floodgates and put it all out there.
As if he was holding back with Pan’s Labrynth and we haven’t seen what he’s been keeping in the holster yet.
That excites me.
