It looks like the unnamed horror project Guillermo Del Toro was quite coy about during this past week’s San Diego Comic-Con may turn out to be one of his dream projects finally getting a chance to be up on the big-screen. Mike Fleming over at Deadline has reported that Del Toro’s next directing project since leaving The Hobbit will indeed be his long-gestating project to adapt H.P. Lovecraft’s classic scifi novella, At The Mountains of Madness.
He will not be going alone in this project as best buddy and confidant James Cameron has also joined Del Toro on his dream project as producer. Fresh off of the humngous success of Avatar has made Cameron the King of Hollywood once again and his name and clout should be able to give Del Toro the necessary muscle to get Universal not just to move the project forward but give Del Toro the budget he wants and the hands-off treatment he works best under.
Fleming also reports that the film will be in 3D which makes sense with Cameron being on-board and someone who can give Del Toro all the assistance he needs with the 3D tech Cameron has developed from his work with Avatar. The fact that Cameron will let his name be used in the promoting of the film speaks volumes as Cameron is known to be very choosy as to which projects he lends his name out to that he doesn’t direct.
There will be some moans and groans to the mention of 3D. Del Toro has never dismissed 3D, but didn’t see himself as having a particular project that worked best with it. Like any visually-gifted filmmaker, Del Toro knows how to use the tools of his trade both new and old so I don’t think Cameron’s 3D film-tech will be something he wouldn’t want to try out. Plus, if there was ever a story to be adapted onto the big-screen that would not just work well with Cameron’s 3D tech but also look beautiful it would have to be a Lovecraft tale and especially one with a setting and plot that’s not just epic but cosmic in scale. From the massive vistas of the non-Euclidean structures of the Elder Gods to the Plateau of Leng which may or may not have been the base for Cthulhu and his Star-spawns. Plus, we can’t forget the amorphous beings the “Shoggoths” which definitely would become even more terrifying in 3D.
I really hope that this project moves forward and with the speed with which Del Toro works I won’t be surprised if during San Diego Comic-Con in 2011 we get to see good footage of the film as a sneak-peek for a 2012 release.
Source: Deadline
Through the Shattered Lens 
I hated Avatar but if that film’s undeserved success allows Del Toro to bring Lovecraft to the screen then I guess some good can even come out of one of the worst movies ever made. 🙂
But seriously, my feelings about Avatar aside, Del Toro is one of the few directors that I can think of who could actually do Lovecraft justice. Peter Jackson’s a bit too much of a humanist to capture Lovecraft’s bleak worldview (everything that made Jackson perfect for Lord of the Rings would make totally wrong for Lovecraft) and Sam Raimi’s not quite serious enough but Del Toro is probably the first director since the death of Lucio Fulci who could faithfully translate Lovecraft’s work.
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I knew you’d get an Avatar shot in there, LOL.
I think Del Toro has been snubbed too often with his personal pics by the award shows. I rate him above Jackson, Raimi and pretty much every fantasist filmmaker working today and of the last 25 or so years. I really think that, like LOTR was waiting until Jackson came along to finally get made, I think Lovecraft stories have been waiting for Del Toro to come along. I hope Cameron’s clout allows Del Toro to shoot the film as a balls-out Rated-R horror the way Carpenter re-did The Thing in such a way that an R-rating was the least it could get.
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lol. Yeah, Erin was reading my comment before I posted it and as soon as she read my comment about Avatar, she looked at me and said, “Now you’re just bragging about hating that movie!”
But more importantly, I agree with you 100% on Del Toro. Saw an older film of his recently called Cronos that simply amazed me. Well, here’s hoping that he gets to make the film that we know he’s capable of doing. For me, of course, the ultimate Lovecraft adaptation remains Fulci’s Beyond trilogy even though that actually was not a Lovecraft adaptation (but, then again, what other trilogy of films can be said to feature performances from both Giovanni Lombardo Radice and David Warbeck?)
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