Guillermo del Toro‘s filmmaking career is littered with unmade films, but the one that gets brought up time and again is his adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness.
But even with Tom Cruise attached to star, the big screen take on H.P. Lovecraft‘s 1936 cosmic horror novella never became a reality. The closest we’ll ever get is this CGI test. For Hollywood, the works of Lovecraft (while profoundly influential on the horror genre as a whole) are just too out-there and, as a result, not commercially viable.
As Mike Flanagan put it to SYFY Wire in 2022, “It scares the hell out of executives.”
They don’t call it weird fiction for nothing.
Why H.P. Lovecraft Is Hard to Adapt, According to Guillermo del Toro
For del Toro, the biggest hurdle is the fact that Lovecraft’s writing deals with indescribable entities whose clearance far exceeds the narrow tunnel of human comprehension. Once you give them a concrete definition, as is necessary when working in a visual medium, they lose their ability to frighten through subjective imagination.
“I think it’s hard to adapt Lovecraft, because he uses adjectives that are very open,” the Oscar winner explained in a recent Reddit AMA. “So you’ve got to c-direct, so to speak, every image. And when you make them into film, they become very precise.”
Instead, del Toro prefers movies that riff on Lovecraftian themes without being beholden to specific source material.
“To me, the best adaptation of Lovecraft is Ridley Scott’s Alien, which is basically Mountains of Madness,” the director continued. “Second-best adaptation for me is The Thing. I know it’s not Lovecraft, but it’s very Lovecraftian in its makeup effects language. I love In the Mouth of Madness [
Despite Mountains of Madness languishing in development hell, del Toro still got to realize a pair of classic Lovecraft stories, “Pickman’s Model” and “Dreams in the Witch House,” via his Netflix anthology series, Cabinet of Curiosities.
“Most of his stories, by virtue of their length, are better adapted to one-hour television programs or 30-minute television programs,” he wrote in his AMA response. “I would love to adapt ‘The Thing On the Threshold,’ ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth,’ or ‘The Outsider,’ which is a horror story that is point-of-view until the final image. Those are the ones that scared me the most or disturbed me the most. At The Mountains is the only one, I think, that is a full feature.”
