Guillermo del Toro Finally Puts His Unmade At The Mountains of Madness Movie To Rest
“I don't think people are lining up to do it.”
Guillermo del Toro’s At the Mountains of Madness may go down in history as the greatest unmade movie ever, up there with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune or Tim Burton’s Superman Lives. First announced in 2010, the Shape of Water director had been trying to bring H.P. Lovecraft’s terrifying novella to life for almost two decades. But each subsequent update has proven that the story, which follows a group of explorers in Antarctica who discover the existence of a civilization older than the human race, may truly be unfilmable.
Still, that hasn’t stopped fans from hoping that the impossible would happen, and that At the Mountains of Madness would be one of the rare unmade del Toro projects to escape development hell (we still think about you, Justice League Dark). And when the director shared some gnarly CGI test footage for the film three years ago, the idea of del Toro’s At the Mountains of Madness movie seemed more possible than ever. But del Toro, who is making the press rounds for his lavish new horror epic Frankenstein, may have finally laid those hopes to rest.
I recently spoke with the director at a special New York screening of Frankenstein, where I asked him if there was any chance of his At the Mountains of Madness movie being resurrected. But while del Toro expressed hope that it might someday happen, he seemed to confirm that the project is likely done.
"I don't think so, I would hope so,” del Toro told Inverse. “It depends, it's a big movie. It's a complicated movie to shoot. It is R-rated. So I don't think people are lining up to do it."
Guillermo del Toro on the set of Frankenstein.
Del Toro has been repeating these reasons for why At the Mountains of Madness is still unmade for years: It’s R-rated, there’s no love story, and there’s no happy ending. For what it’s worth, del Toro stuck by his guns and refused to change these elements per original studio Warner Bros.’ demands, but that’s what keeps At the Mountains of Madness as the filmmaker’s ultimate “bucket list” movie, and never a reality. Del Toro recently confirmed this much to Collider, telling the outlet it will likely stay on his bucket list, and “to be completely candid, I don’t know that I want to do it after this.”
Frankenstein, he said, “closes the cycle” that he started with his first feature film Cronos, and which continued through The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Crimson Peak. To del Toro, all of these films, which represent a very dark, Gothic part of the director’s filmography, fulfilled “a certain type of aesthetic, and a certain type of rhythm, and a certain type of empathy.” And now that it all comes to a culmination in his latest film, Frankenstein, he’s ready to move on.
And del Toro seemed excited about his next chapter when I chatted with him. He teased his next stop-motion film with Netflix, an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, which he is co-writing with Dennis Kelly. “It’s very beautiful,” he gushed.
