Del Toro on Madness

Del Toro and AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS is fast entering cock tease territory. Fortunately the man is so loved that I’m ready to sit on my ass and wait for him to get round to making the thing. He spoke to MTV recently, about his visions for the film: “I remember when I was a kid out of the studios came the big event horror movies, ‘The Exorcist,’ ‘Alien,’ ‘Jaws,’ ‘The Shining,’… It is my hope that this movie will be a tentpole movie [of that sort]. It has the scope of a Shackleton epic exploration movie but it’s full of tentacled things… It’s not hard to be faithful to Lovecraft because what is great about the novel is that it’s a compilation of really dry scientific annotations that happen to be annotating something really scary. There is no character or dramatic thread… You take those document and you then create a story. If you were [just rigidly faithful] you would be doing a National Geographic special on a crew that disappeared in an exploration mission.” I know HELLBOY is a great fit, and THE HOBBIT ain’t half bad either, but this is the project Del Toro needs to make. AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS is a novella by H.P. Lovecraft about William Dyer, whose Antarctic expedition encounters the very embodiment of fear.