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.

The Cthulhu Mythos. There have been many attempts to transfer the nightmarish creations of H. P. Lovecraft to the silver screen, but most if not all are struck down by either bad scripts, insufficient budgets, or technical limitations and many consider the mythos to be fundamentally un-filmable as a result.


The way in which Lovecraft wrote many of his tales did not help. Aside from several major reoccurring deities, the ancient cosmic horrors that inhabit his world are usually only referred to or are a the briefest of glimpses. This makes for excellent fiction - allowing the imaginative reader to transfer all their preconceived fears onto the formless entity, therefore creating their own terror as Lovecraft builds the tension. Archaic and dense prose make it a challenge for casual readers and, despite world-wide popularity Lovecraft is very much a cult author.

However The Lord of The Rings was widely considered to be un-filmable until Peter Jackson and his hefty Hollywood budget took up the challenge and astounded cinema-goers across the world. Has the technology caught up to the vision at last? Could CGI give birth the slumbering terror of Cthulhu as he sleeps in R’lyeh. Perhaps. I think the vision would have to be strong, the script solid, and the budget LARGE!

The main problem though is compromise. Lovecraft’s fanatical cult following would be satisfied with nothing less than a true and direct adaptation, whereas those in a position to finance such an endeavour would want it to have a lot more in the way of commercial appeal.

‘The Call of Cthulhu’ has begged for a big screen adaptation ever since its first appearance in Weird Tales back in 1926. But there have been a few small groups out their dedicating to spreading the mythos through film - either as short animations or live action. In the case of The H P Lovecraft Historical Society they went backwards in technological terms to create a 47 minute Silent movie of ‘TCOC’:



Director Guillermo del Toro has a screenplay that he wrote for an adaptation of ‘At The Mountains of Madness’, but has had trouble getting Warner Bros to finance it. It’s unfortunate considering that del Toro is a fantastic director, and one that can handle the supernatural very well (See Hellboy II!), but also, according to the DVD commentary on Alien Vs Predator, ‘ATMOM’ was one of its main inspirations - so there is precedent to make the case for it. If Warner Bro’s do ever finance it they could do worse than take a look at the following faux-trailer from you tube.com for inspiration.



Search Youtube.com and you can find everything from stop-motion, to hand-drawn, and CG films - some of which stick to the stories in the mythos, others however go for a more original route. I’m going to leave you with a handful that have impressed me over the years.