Shoggoths on film

"Mountains of Madness, which is a project I've had for several years, if it comes to fruition I'd rather do that immediately while the iron is hot," del Toro says. "But it all depends on so many factors — creative, personal — that every time I predict what I'm going to do next, I fail."

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This was the statement that director Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy) made in 2006 on the subject of a movie adaption of H. P. Lovecraft's classic novella, At the Mountains of Madness. Since then, the subject has been mostly quiet and Del Toro has had some difficulty in getting studio funding, as his script supposedly stays true to the original story in that it has an unhappy ending and no love interest. As of right now, the project is scheduled to be released in 2010 but there's no telling if that will be the case, especially seeing as it was just recently announced that Del Toro would be moving to New Zealand for four years to direct a two-part adaption of The Hobbit.

It's absolutely insane that Hollywood has yet to fully embrace Lovecraft's Cthulu mythos but not really surprising. Lovecraft's work is loved in horror circles for all the same reasons that studios would balk at adapting it; his writing style is dry and realistic, with little emphasis on character, it's dark and almost always depressing, it's incredibly surreal and offbeat and likely the most significant difficulty is that it's never, ever simple. Lovecraftian monsters aren't everyday brutish creatures that fling up from nuclear experiments, they're mythical, godlike, unrepentant, evil beings that predate mankind by thousands of years and are described as being more horrifying than the human eye could ever imagine.

It's been tried before, no doubt but never has it been done correctly. Flicks like the The Unnamable have little to do with the stories they're based on and Re-Animator, as great as it is, is based on one of the least "Lovecraftian" Lovecraft tales. The closest to accomplishing the feat has been the films by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society but these still make one lust for a big budget adaption. When Cloverfield was still in its secretive early stages, there was some speculation that the monster might be Cthulhu himself...ah, if only, if only.

However, from what Del Toro has said in interviews, it seems clear that he has the right ideas and know how to make a Lovecraft movie work and At the Mountains of Madness is one of the best stories to transfer to film. While the story is written just as dryly as any other, the events described in it have huge potential to be extremely cinematic. One has to just picture a vast range of icy, antarctic mountains that put Everest to shame, surrounding an ancient city that predates mankind by thousands of years, or to imagine what today's effects and Del Tor's imagination could do with the Shoggoths; hideous, tar black, giant amorphous monsters that constantly change shape and sprout new pairs of eyes. Shoggoths, as imagined by Del Toro, could very easily be as memorable a creature as his Pale Man in Pan's Labyrinth, or even in time become an absolutely icon film monster like Giger's Alien or the shape shifter in John Carpenter's The Thing. One can only hope.

Lovecraft's monsters and the dark, mysterious atmosphere of his works are something that the horror genre desperately needs right now. What once was old is new again and a touch of Madness could be just the thing to revolutionize today's remake-crazy horror movies.

-Nicholas Conley