Del Toro, Cameron Prepare to Scale “Mountains of Madness”

If the movie is scarier than this book cover, than del Toro will have done well.

Deadline writes that Guillermo del Toro’s next project will be an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s scifi/horror classic “At the Mountains of Madness.” The movie will be made in 3D for Universal Pictures. James Cameron is producing.

Lovecraft’s 1931 novella is about a geologist who finds an unknown chain of mountains during an expedition ot Antarctica. On the other side of the mountain, they find remains of life forms that show that humans may have come from a society of elder gods on another planet. Things get scary when the life forms regain life.

Del Toro’s plans for “Mountains” started out at DreamWorks in 2004, where del Toro brought the script he wrote with Matthew Robbins (which they are now rewriting). When del Toro signed an exclusive deal with Universal in 2007, he brought the project there. That was put on hold when he agreed to make “The Hobbit” movies…which he no longer is doing, of course.

Cameron’s involvement, though, is apparently what helped push Universal into taking the big step. Cameron has said that he’s not planning on tossing his name onto every 3D movie out there, aside from his already planned remake of “Fantastic Voyage,” but he made an exception for del Toro, who probably stunned him into participation with his un-Hollywood-like tendency to speak honestly, openly, and at great length.

Cameron’s participation is a big deal not just because of his name, but because of his experience working on large, epic, 3D movies. This is not intended to be a low-budget horror movie run through a 3D conversion process in postproduction. Au contraire, my friends. Del Toro thinks that people have gotten a little too comfortable with the idea of cheap horror movies. In an exclusive interview with ComingSoon at Comic-Con, the director said:

What ‘Mountains of Madness’ is is a throwback to something nobody does anymore, it’s tentpole horror,” he told us. “Everybody now understands horror as minimum investment, maximum return, and most of the time, they go at it, as production entities, with great cynicism, like ‘Let’s make it really gory or extreme’ and for a very low budget, and recuperate our investment, make money, all that. If you make a horror movie for half a million and it makes 4, they’re very happy. The studio sees horror movies as something they will not invest more than $30-40 million. ‘Mountains of Madness’ needs to be tentpole in the way that the tentpole movies of the past were, about $130 million.”

“I remember when I saw ‘Alien’ and I was absolutely blown away by it,” he continued. “I saw John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing,’ I saw Kubrick’s ‘The Shining.’ These were massive movies in a genre that normally doesn’t get massive movies. (With) ‘Mountains of Madness,’ there are two things that I’ve been battling all these years: period and R-rated, and a very very tough ending, so the studio is very scared of period obviously, he’s very scared of the budget and an R-rating, and the first conversation I always have is, ‘Does it have to be R?’ and I go, ‘Yes.’ ‘Does it have to be period? Does it have to be Antarctica?’ ‘Yes.’”

“‘Mountains’ is my dream and we’ve been pursuing it for thirteen years and I hope it happens.”

You can see the whole video of the interview with del Toro here, by the way. I’m sure he’ll have more to say.

ComingSoon says they are trying to get everything signed and agreed upon so pre-production can start, with plans to film next summer.