His ideas were incredibly detailed and ambitious, prompting salivation from Lovecraft readers who knew from movies like Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy how Del Toro had the right sensibility to bring Lovecraft’s daunting concepts to life.

as an R-rated horror movie with a giant budget, which received moral and financial support from Tom Cruise and James Cameron. In 2006, he wrote a script, and proposed it to Warner Bros.

The frozen landscape, the alien biology, the daunting architecture - all of this was fertile territory for Del Toro’s strengths as a director who can convincingly give fantastical concepts the dramatic heft they deserved. Horrific monsters emerge from the abyss, ready to conquer life on Earth. The expedition goes… not well, as you might imagine. In the story, an expedition to Antarctica finds an ancient, undisturbed city filled with alien life forms, suggesting a stranger precedent to humanity. The most cherished attempt to bring Lovecraft to the big screen is a movie that was never even made: Guillermo Del Toro’s long-developed, eventually-abandoned take on “At the Mountains of Madness”, one of Lovecraft’s most iconic stories. It is the tale of a group of explorers who uncover some horrible artifacts and creatures in Antarctica that might or might not prove that humanity is but the insect-like byproduct of the real. Somewhat surprisingly, a cinematic adaptation of Lovecraft’s work has never really broken through to the mainstream - there have been plenty of B-movie and smaller films based off his stories, but the intellectual property has remained relatively unmined, even in this era of endless conceptual recycling. That’s a testament to the power of his unsettling imagination, in which a primordial, ageless darkness lies just underneath humanity. Lovecraft was a bitter racist and reactionary, but nonetheless, his stories of cosmic horror and characters like the eldritch god Cthulhu have imprinted on the literary consciousness for nearly a century.

At the mountains of madness