Tag: at the mountains of madness

Don’t tease me, bro: del Toro and At The Mountains of Madness.

Saw this on Facebook. It’s painful to contemplate, man. Painful.

Guillermo del Toro Still Hopes to Make H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness

H.P. Lovecraft is considered one of the most seminal authors in all of horror and sci-fi literature, with filmmaker Guillero del Toro considered a visionary of cinema, and while del Toro’s previous efforts to adapt Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness never moved forward, he recently confirmed that he’s still interested in making that project become a reality. The project first started to take shape back in the mid-2000s but didn’t seem to make substantial steps forward until the early 2010s, but even with impressive names attached, del Toro’s plans never worked out and he continues to hope the stars will align for the adventure.

I want this movie real bad, AS YOU ALL KNOW. But I suspect that the only way del Toro’s gonna get it made is if he tells the studio that he’s filming something else and nobody comes and checks. I know that sounds stupid, but apparently there’s resistance to doing the movie – and, no: I don’t know why it’s so hard to arrange, either. Maybe they’re worried about it coming out when the stars are right.

My only exoteric* comment about the Oscars.

And it’s one that many other people have made.  To with, that Guillermo Del Toro’s Best Director Oscar gives him some serious Hollywood juice right now.  Possibly even enough juice to let him make the picture every Lovecraft fan in the world wants him to make: a big-screen adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness.  As I said on Twitter the other day… I don’t know what I would do to get a Del Toro Mountains of Madness. I don’t know if I want to know what I’d do to get a Del Toro Mountains of Madness. But I’d watch the hell out of that movie, if he made it.

Moe Lane

*Yes, it’s a word. One that I’ve always been fond of.

Tough choice to make on the next @HPLHS Dark Adventure Radio Theater.

I’m going to pick up one of them (via here), certainly: but do I go with ‘At The Mountains of Madness’ or ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth?’  Both are perfectly translatable into radio drama; and I like both stories about equally, so there’s no help there. And they both got good reviews, so there’s no help there.

And no, ‘get them both’ is not currently an option. Alas.

del Toro to do At the Mountains of Madness.

(Via Nodwick) And it will not be a light romantic comedy set in modern Nebraska.  Do you think that I jest?  Go look at what they did to Exit To Eden if you want to see what Hollywood can do to a book.  Not going to be a problem here:

The main issues that financiers have had is that del Toro needed his movie to be a period film, and he needed it to be R-rated. Movies like that are really hard to market, and so studios, such as Universal in this case, haven’t wanted to pay for it.

[snip]

So why would Universal decide that they were finally ready to take the risk? One name: James Cameron. According to the reports, the Avatar director has decided to back del Toro’s vision and come on as a producer. Not only that, but the movie will be in 3D, and there’s no one else on the planet right now that you want in your corner when it comes to 3D more than James Cameron. They even plan to start pre-production immediately with hopes of filming some time next summer.

Cameron’s a bit of a… wonderful person who is going to help put one of Lovecraft’s most epic vistas on the screen… but he knows how to do big, and big is what you need when you’re doing a horror/adventure story about a lost, pre-human Antarctic city.  There’s been a real dearth of big-screen Mythos movies that have been mainstream successes – I count three, in fact, and none of them are officially Lovecraft films* – so I’m kind of hoping that this one takes off.

Moe Lane Continue reading del Toro to do At the Mountains of Madness.

Great. Giant mountains in Antarctica.

Just great:

Alp-sized peaks found entombed in Antarctic ice

OSLO (Reuters) – Jagged mountains the size of the Alps have been found entombed in Antarctica’s ice, giving new clues about the vast ice sheet that will raise world sea levels if even a fraction of it melts, scientists said on Tuesday.

Using radar and gravity sensors, the experts made the first detailed maps of the Gamburtsev subglacial mountains, originally detected by Russian scientists 50 years ago at the heart of the East Antarctic ice sheet.

“The surprising thing was that not only is this mountain range the size of the Alps, but it looks quite similar to the (European) Alps, with high peaks and valleys,” said Fausto Ferraccioli, a geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey who took part in the research.

Fark, of course, immediately twigged to the problem here, and it ain’t global warming. It’s the fact that there are big honking mountains in Antarctica, just like HP Lovecraft said that there were.  Which leads one to wonder what else the man was right about… if I was dumb enough to think about it too closely, of course. So I’ll just note that Charlie Stross’ “A Colder War” (found in his collection of short stories Toast) is a fun sequel to Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, particularly if you like Cold War-era paranoia.

And really, who doesn’t?