Long before winning an Oscar for The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro regularly expressed his interest in adapting H.P. Lovecraft‘s novella At the Mountains of Madness. Even with James Cameron and Tom Cruise reportedly getting on board the adaptation, del Toro ultimately confessed that, not only were the works of Lovecraft too unconventional for studios to fully support financially, but also that Ridley Scott‘s Prometheus was too similar to his adaptation that it would no longer be happening.
It’s hard to imagine a better pairing of a filmmaker and source material than Guillermo del Toro and H.P. Lovecraft, and while his take on At the Mountains of Madness might be gone, the filmmaker is still interested in adapting other works from the author.
During a Reddit AMA in support of the 20th-anniversary release of Pan’s Labyrinth, one user asked del Toro if there were other Lovecraft stories he’d like to adapt into a movie. Interesting, del Toro not only named some stories he’d like to adapt, but also confirmed that Lovecraft stories were better suited to 30- or 60-minute adaptations.
The filmmaker detailed:
“Most of his stories, by virtue of their length, are better adapted to one-hour television programs or 30-minute television programs. 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.”
Del Toro continued, “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.”
“But I think it’s hard to adapt Lovecraft, because he uses adjectives that are very open,” del Toro adds. “So you’ve got to co-direct, so to speak, every image. And when you make them into film, they become very precise. To me, the best adaptation of Lovecraft is Ridley Scott’s Alien, which is basically Mountains of Madness. 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. I love Stuart Gordon’s Dagon. I love The Resurrected by Dan O’Bannon. It’s full of craziness. There are a few movies that have been done in the right way.”
It’s hard to argue with del Toro’s point about just how challenging it is to adapt Lovecraft, with the most well-known straightforward adaptation of his work being Re-Animator. With Lovecraft’s penchant for exploring cosmic terror that is difficult enough to grasp in literature, trying to translate those ideas into more accessible movies is a feat few filmmakers even attempt.
With the filmmaker having delivered Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities to Netflix in 2022, an anthology series that featured a variety of stories and filmmakers (including Lovecraft!), we can’t help but hope for a world in which he develops a similar series focused entirely on Lovecraft’s works. However, with del Toro becoming only more popular and busier with each passing year, it’s hard to imagine him having the time to spend on such a project.
Up next, look for Pan’s Labyrinth back in theaters – in 4K and 3D – beginning October 9.
