He envisaged it as the dawn of a new era of big-budget horror moviesthat offer a classier take on the genre. But Guillermo Del Toro admitted yesterday that his dream project, a $150m 3D adaptation of HP Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, may never see the light of day.
In an email to the New Yorker's Daniel Zalewski, who has been following the Mexican director's attempts to get the ambitious movie greenlit, Del Toro wrote: "Madness has gone dark. The 'R' did us in."
Del Toro refers to the R certificate that the film was likely to receive from US censors. Lovecraft's story concerns a group of scientists who encounter mutating aliens during an expedition to Antarctica, and Del Toro was not keen to tone down the horror to achieve a more marketable PG13 rating. He had previously told the New Yorker that while the film would not be especially gory, he wished to retain the creative freedom "to make it really, really uncomfortable and nasty" and therefore required permission to risk an R. However, it seems Universal was unwilling to finance a movie that might struggle at the box office. Only those above the age of 17 can see an R movie in the US, unless accompanied by an adult.
"The natural flaw of horror is that 99% of the time it's a clandestine genre," Del Toro said in another conversation with Zalewski. "It lives and breathes – Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the first Saw, The Blair Witch Project – in dark little corners that come out and haunt you. Rarely is there a beautiful orchid that blooms." The film-maker compared the scope of At the Mountains of Madness to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. "[That] was a major film-maker using cutting-edge optical technology and special effects," he said. "It was a big-budget movie. It had Edith Head designing costumes, it had all the luxuries. And it was appealing because it had all the polished aspects of a studio film."
Universal's refusal to fund the project is surprising since it was reported yesterday that Tom Cruise had agreed to star. Producer Don Murphy told io9 that filming was scheduled to begin in June, but later retracted his statement.
