Never-Before-Seen Footage From Guillermo Del Toro’s Greatest Unmade Movie Released
Guillermo Del Toro just released CGI test footage from his unmade Lovecraft adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness.
Director Guillermo Del Toro, already a legend among not only horror but film giants themselves, has just released test footage for one of his most hotly anticipated projects… that never happened. Yes, finally after ten years since audiences heard news that Del Toro’s adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s most notable work was canned, fans can now see footage from At the Mountains of Madness.
Guillermo Del Toro and Industrial Light and Magic, the warlocks of CGI behind Star Wars and many other famous projects uploaded a thirty-second clip to Instagram yesterday, showing an arctic explorer being caught unaware by a terrifying abomination of tentacles. The clip ends as the unfortunate soul is being dragged away, his fate uncertain, but leaning towards either a terrible death or eternal madness.
At the Mountains of Madness follows a team of Arctic explorers on a track to discover what they believe to be a lost civilization. What they end up finding, much to their misfortune, are giant, frozen gods of unimaginable horror. Lovecraft’s often described his creatures as being terror on a cosmic level, something humans can’t even comprehend without losing sanity and turning into raving madmen. The design of creatures and gods from Lovecraft’s is what is largely agreed to be the unfilmable part of the film.
While Guillermo Del Toro has been wowing movie goers for almost three decades now, racking up awards while he does so for films like The Shape of Water and Pan’s Labyrinth. The director has been known to play with genres that seem for the most part impossible to bring to film. Most notable, and probably most ambitious, is the tribute to mecha anime and Kaiju films Pacific Rim from 2013. While it was snubbed by the Academy (despite being pure cinema at its finest), the film has grown a cult following, leading to spinoffs and sequels.
Guillermo Del Toro, currently running high off his Netflix-produced series Cabinet of Curiosities and the upcoming Pinnochio has been an outspoken and passionate fan of Lovecraft’s works for some time. During the late 2000s, after coming off of a winning streak from the Hellboy films and Pan’s Labyrinth, Del Toro seemed to be all set to film his passion project, but the release of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus seemingly dashed those hopes in 2012. According to producers, the films were just too similar in tone which led to Prometheus taking priority.
The works of Lovecraft have always had their place in literature and fiction history, often focusing on Eldritch creatures from beyond our cosmos that bring only madness and suffering to those they interact with on earth. Guillermo Del Toro certainly isn’t the first to want to adapt this work, with various directors such as John Carpenter (In the Mouth of Madness) and Richard Stanley (The Colour Out of Space) trying their hand at direct and indirect adaptations of the authors more terrifying elements.
So will it happen? There have been cases where leaked test footage led to higher interest and more push for a movie to be made, most notably by Ryan Reynolds when he leaked the Deadpool test footage all those years ago. Can Guillermo Del Toro have the same luck? Many fans have their fingers crossed, while others may be performing an offering to some of Lovecraft’s cosmic deities even now, just to experience a little bit of Guillermo Del Toro’s twist of madness.
