Sad news for fans of H.P. Lovecraft and Guillermo del Toro, with the Mexican film-maker telling The New Yorker that his movie adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness has “gone dark”:
After three months of deliberation, Universal Pictures, the studio that gave del Toro money for pre-production creature designs, has remained unwilling to give the director a greenlight, citing concerns over the film’s budget and likely R rating. On Monday, del Toro withdrew from the negotiations, and that night at ten-thirty he sent me a short, mournful e-mail: “Madness has gone dark. The ‘R’ did us in.”
Del Toro had told me that he would not compromise on the film’s rating, even though a film rated PG-13 would have a much easier time attracting a mass audience. “Madness,” as he imagined it, would not be particularly gory, but he insisted that he needed the artistic freedom “to make it really, really uncomfortable and nasty.” Del Toro had hoped that a greenlight for “Madness” would mark a new golden age for horror films.
The news comes just a day after it was revealed that Tom Cruise would likely star in the film. It remains possible that another studio might pick up the project, so fingers crossed that Del Toro gets to make the movie at some stage.
But who needs 3D glasses and a movie screen when you’ve got that imagination chip in your skull attached to ocular peripherals? Get on over to Cthulhu Chick’s website where you can download The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft as a single (legal and free) eBook. Kindle readers can grab the .mobi version, while others (iBooks, Nook etc) can use the .epub file.
As an interesting aside, while completing the project Cthulhu Chick also did a word count of Lovecraft’s baroque prose, which you can browse at her website.
Previously on TDG:
