Whoever has dared to delve into the overwhelming pages of ‘In the mountains of madness’ you will know that the story of the master HP Lovecraft is, if not impossible, tremendously complicated to adapt to the cinematographic medium —in fact, that is one of the hallmarks of cosmic horror—; but there is a filmmaker bold enough and devoted to the work of Providence as to have tried to materialize the feat.
adapt the unadaptable
This is none other than Guillermo del Toro, who, along with Mattew Robbins, wrote a script and submitted it to Warner Bros., where they weren’t very keen on financing a wildly ambitious project. Since then, the ‘Mountains of madness’ of the Mexican have been tumbling, coming to pass through the hands of the almighty James Cameron in a 3D production which was going to star Tom Cruise and also ended up falling on deaf ears due to the director’s rejection of a PG-13 rating.
More than a decade after the fiasco, del Toro has shared a short clip on his Instagram account that allows us to see for the first time a CGI test created by the Industrial Light & Magic company. In it, a trademark tentacular creature mercilessly attacks one of the members of the expedition to Antarctica on which the story revolves. Music for our retinas, come on.
This fragment, in addition to making us dream of what could have been the passion project particular of Guillermo del Toro, sticks his finger in the sore spot and reminds us that we will never get to see it. Though there is still a small halo of hopebecause the filmmaker commented about a year ago that he is interested in resurrecting it with Netflix in what he defines as a version “smaller and weirder”.
Will we get to see her one day? Only time will tell. What is almost certain is that she will not be budgeted in the 150 million of the original vision. A shame.