Guillermo del Toro has spoken about his long-gestating HP Lovecraft horror movie Mountains of Madness. Basically, it's taking so long because the Nightmare Alley director has some rewrites he still hasn't made.
This was revealed on an episode of The Kingscast, a podcast dedicated to the works of Stephen King, where del Toro explained all the hold up. “The screenplay I co-wrote fifteen years ago is not the screenplay I would do now, so I need to do a rewrite. Not only to scale it down somehow, but because back then I was trying to bridge the scale of it with elements that would make it go through the studio machinery,” he says. “I don’t think I need to reconcile that anymore. I can go to a far more esoteric, weirder, smaller version of it. You know, where I can go back to some of the scenes that were left out.”
He goes on to say he has “no appetite” for some of the bigger scenes he's designed, but that there are four in particular he's still keen on. “I feel like going into a weirder direction,” he explains. “I know a few things will stay. I know the ending we have is one the most intriguing, weird, unsettling endings, for me.”
The film would be based on Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness novella, about an expedition through Antarctica in the 1930s that leads to horrifying results. Back in 2006, del Toro co-wrote a screenplay with Matthew Robbins that went through various permutations before 2013, when he said he was taking one last run at getting it made.
From the sounds of it, we might yet see the mysterious picture one day. In any case, you get a fix of del Toro from Nightmare Alley, his new thriller movie, out December 17.
And next year, we have Netflix horror movie Pinocchio – we’ll keep you posted when we know more.