At The Mountains of Madness

Further to my post from a few months ago ('Filming the un-filmable'), it has emerged since then that the pre-production for Guillermo Del Toro's film adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's 'At The Mountains of Madness' has got the green light from Universal.

The film is to be produced by the legendary James Cameron and the script has been written by both Del Toro and Matthew Robbins. Speculation is already rampent about who will be starring in the film. Names such as Ron Perlman, Tom Cruise and James McAvoy have already been thrown around in connection to the project.

According to shocktillyoudrop.com Del Torro told The New York Times' 'Times Talks' Series:

"We've been designing for the last 3-weeks. It's being produced by James Cameron, who's been a friend for 20-years," del Toro said, "we have avoided working together until the time came for the right project. Obviously, the difference between the novella and the movie is that Lovecraft had a gift for making everything specifically ambiguous. He would say 'the leering face loaded with madness,’ or 'the evil perverse entity of unnamable'… everything was unnamable, indescribable. When you're reading you go,'Whoa!' your brain fills those spaces. For every creature, everyone has a secret mental image of what those creatures look like. It's going to be impossible to please everyone."

James Cameron has told Wired that the film could be on the same scale as something like Aliens and gives his thoughts on Del Toro as a director:

"Guillermo brings an eye for design that is so original and so quirky and so steeped in the lore of movie design and horror design, but always fresh and unexpected. Frankly, I just want to see what he comes up with and I want to enable the nuts and bolts of the production so he doesn’t have to worry about that. I want to help him how to work in 3-D."

Lovecraft fans as well as general horror movie fans must be salivating at the prospect of this film. So far all the rumblings from those putting it have been very positive from the hype surrounding the design to the calibre of actors whose names are being thrown around.

At the same time there is even more to celebrate as James Cameron has announced his return to the seminal Alien franchise with the pre-production on the 5th installment of the series that will infact be a prequal to the first film.

Personally, I can't wait for 'Alien 5' and 'At The Mountains of Madness' to crawl onto the silver screen and relieve me of my speculation.