It’s a good year to be a Guillermo del Toro fan. Not only did 2022 kick off with his excellent Nightmare Alley adaptation (and its black-and-white version), but we got a Halloween treat in the Netflix anthology he curated, Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet Of Curiosities – plus, he’s finally about to unleash his long-awaited stop-motion Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio on the world. But if you’ll permit us to be just a little bit entitled for a second, we’d love to see even more from the director – there’s an especially compelling list of the GdT projects that got away: the never-made Hellboy 3, his Haunted Mansion movie, and his HP Lovecraft adaptation At The Mountains Of Madness, the latter of which remains a particularly mythical unrealised film.
Now, for the first time, del Toro has released a look at some test footage for At The Mountains Of Madness. Shared on Instagram, he described it as an “all CGI test for a rig”, created by the ILM team a decade ago. Take a look for yourself here.
As you’d expect from del Toro, there’s some mind-bending monster imagery here (he really is an ideal director to take on Lovecraft’s unfathomable cosmic horrors), a chilly location that brings to mind The Thing, and nightmarish tentacular action that recalls the beasts waiting in Frank Darabont’s adaptation of The Mist. And what it does show, in just 25 seconds of fully-CGI concept footage, is that we’re still aching for At The Mountains Of Madness to actually exist at some point. (Hey, we’ll also take Hellboy 3 while you’re at it. Please?)
Does del Toro have more footage where that came from? Will he ever return to Lovecraft for an upcoming project? And where does he go post-Pinocchio? Stay tuned to see what the legendary director does next.