http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=21168
Good news for fans of Guillermo del Toro – and after Pan's Labyrinth, that should be all of you.
For it seems that after the great man finishes his current pet project, the currently-shooting Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, he'll move onto another pet project: his long-awaited adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's At The Mountains Of Madness.
Madness, in which an Antartic expedition stumbles upon a mountain range taller than the Himalayas that contains an indescribable and ancient evil, has been on del Toro's to-do list (pinned up on his fridge) for ages. In fact, location scouting for Madness had already taken place in Romania before Hellboy 2 was greenlit; if that hadn't happened, it's highly likely that del Toro would have been shooting it right now.
A huge Lovecraft fan, del Toro had been previously unable to find a studio willing to make At The Mountains Of Madness. Perhaps they were scared by the superficial similarity to John Carpenter's The Thing (although, of course, Lovecraft's tale predates that by almost seventy years), but now Universal and producers Don Murphy and Susan Montford have given del Toro their backing, it looks like this will be his next movie, ahead of his Tarzan reboot and another secret project that Empire has learned of, but can't reveal just yet.
And we wish Guillermo well – one of the nicest guys in Hollywood, he's now developed into a truly world-class film-maker and At The Mountains Of Madness gives him ample opportunity to unleash the monsters of his dreams.
However, as Latino Review's Kellvin Chavez – who broke the story – muses, will this be a pre-strike shoot for del Toro? Given that Hellboy 2 doesn't finish post-production until May or June of next year, we reckon it's unlikely. But you never know – and with the script ready, plus location scouting and some design work, del Toro could be tackling those Mountains sooner than you think.
Empire Empire
When I first clicked this topic I thought,
I swear to god - if I get rick rolled one more time...
but thankfully, this thread delivers.
This has been in the talks for a long time on the nets, and I'm glad to see they've finally announced it along with the director. I think speculation about it was pointing to Peter Jackson, M. Night Shammamalamalon, and Guillermo del Toro. I'm glad it's the latter, 'cause while Hellboy wasn't the most brilliant thing ever, I thought it was certainly Lovecraftian enough towards the end. Those scenes are probably a nice preview of what's to be expected from At the Mountains of Madness, so I'm excited. Also, he did a good job with Pan's Labyrinth. I wanna watch that bottle bash, again.
I really like del Toro's work (including Devil's Backbone) but I really felt cheated over Pan's Labyrinth. That's probably due, mostly to the fact that all of the advertising indicated a movie with heavy fantasy and mentioned nothing about a movie with heavy Spanish Civil War scenes. The movie itself, once I got over the fact that almost all of the fantasy scenes were in the commercials, was good.l I think he'll do very well with Lovecraft.
Though to be fair, it will be hard to top Stuart Gorden... that guy seems to understand Lovecraft far better than anyone that's tried to adapt his stuff.
I liked Pan's Labyrinth being set during the Spanish Civil War. I like those 'modern' fantasy types, where the strangeness lurks around the corners (and sometimes in plain sight). Charles de Lint and Grant Morrison-type of stuff. Anywho, thought I'd point this out if it isn't already known: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804493/
Apparently Stuart Gorden has written and directed a new Re-Animator, House of the Re-Animator. It's slated for 2008. It's news to me, at least.
Mittens for Guillermo del Toro: :mittens:
This should be good.
Quote from: Cainad on October 05, 2007, 11:34:56 PM
Mittens for Guillermo del Toro: :mittens:
This should be good.
Preview:
http://members.on.nimp.org
WTF ROGER I HATE YOU
:?
That's no anus. That's a hole into a realm of Madness! :lulz:
i read a bunch of lovecraft stories, unfortunately this one wasn't in it. i shall have to find it somewhere soon so i can bitch about how the book was better.
though Pan's Labyrinth was very cool. i had to watch it twice.
Woohoo! I've been keeping an eye on Del Toro since i read about this being his his dream project a few years ago.
I guess the original story is more or less unfilmable (in the hollywood sense) since it has almost no action until the very end, no romance (all male cast, heavily dressed and mostly oxygen-masked, I bet the producers aren't too happy about that...) so unfortunately they will probably have to make big changes.
Still, Del Toro should be able to pull it off.
Quote from: nurbldoff on October 06, 2007, 02:20:19 AM
Woohoo! I've been keeping an eye on Del Toro since i read about this being his his dream project a few years ago.
I guess the original story is more or less unfilmable (in the hollywood sense) since it has almost no action until the very end, no romance (all male cast, heavily dressed and mostly oxygen-masked, I bet the producers aren't too happy about that...) so unfortunately they will probably have to make big changes.
Still, Del Toro should be able to pull it off.
The original story was written as a periodical for Weird Tales, which in a way explains the style of OH WAIT, I FORGOT SOMETHING EVEN MOAR HORRIBLE AND TERRIFYING THAT I NEED TO TELL YOU NOW, WAIT TELLING YOU THAT THING JUST TRIGGERED ANOTHER MEMORY WHICH IS EVEN MOAR TERRIBLE AND HORRIFYING THAN I THE ONE THAT I JUST SAID. Actually, thats always been one of my least favorite lovecraft stories, specifically for how often it starts over from the beginning and retells itself, including an additional detail every single time. I doubt the movie will illustrate the story in that fashion, or if it does it will probably not be nearly as severe. I think its going to work, and it might just be enough to cheer me up from the fucking hackjob they're doing to the Watchmen.
Quote from: Z³ on October 06, 2007, 07:00:04 AM
fucking hackjob they're doing to the Watchmen.
Oh god, please tell me they're not raping Watchmen? And to think I was contemplating what it would be like for an Invisibles movie to come out. :(
Quote from: rabidpigmy on October 06, 2007, 07:02:39 AM
Quote from: Z³ on October 06, 2007, 07:00:04 AM
fucking hackjob they're doing to the Watchmen.
Oh god, please tell me they're not raping Watchmen? And to think I was contemplating what it would be like for an Invisibles movie to come out. :(
No-name cast, writer, and director? Its going to suck. Word on the street says they changed the overall storyline in such a way that the entire point of the story is completely overlooked, action sequences are needlessly shoehorned in, not to mention that a brief look at the cast list shows that none of the actors are appropriate for their roles. The comedian, for example, should be pretty old... yet he's portrayed by a young 30's soap opera alum.
Dont get your hopes up.
Quote from: Z³ on October 06, 2007, 07:24:25 AM
Quote from: rabidpigmy on October 06, 2007, 07:02:39 AM
Quote from: Z³ on October 06, 2007, 07:00:04 AM
fucking hackjob they're doing to the Watchmen.
Oh god, please tell me they're not raping Watchmen? And to think I was contemplating what it would be like for an Invisibles movie to come out. :(
No-name cast, writer, and director? Its going to suck. Word on the street says they changed the overall storyline in such a way that the entire point of the story is completely overlooked, action sequences are needlessly shoehorned in, not to mention that a brief look at the cast list shows that none of the actors are appropriate for their roles. The comedian, for example, should be pretty old... yet he's portrayed by a young 30's soap opera alum.
Dont get your hopes up.
Yeah, I was just in the process of looking into the casting of it. While not necessarily a strictly no-name cast (as one of them is popping up in the Heartbreak Kid), it is an odd one. :|
Quote from: Z³ on October 06, 2007, 07:24:25 AM
No-name cast, writer, and director? Its going to suck. Word on the street says they changed the overall storyline in such a way that the entire point of the story is completely overlooked, action sequences are needlessly shoehorned in, not to mention that a brief look at the cast list shows that none of the actors are appropriate for their roles. The comedian, for example, should be pretty old... yet he's portrayed by a young 30's soap opera alum.
Well, unless they're cutting out a lot of the retrospection in the comic, there will also be fairly young versions of all the main characters, so maybe there's a method to the madness. But I agree the project is most likely doomed and I wish they would leave it alone.
The problem with Lovecraft is that most of his works are not able to be filmed like the story. Much of Lovecraft's appeal is in the words. When he speaks of a Squamish and Eldrich horror. its the squamish and eldrich part that tends to get the reader hooked... Squamish doesn't translate to the big screen.
However, I think Gorden's win was that he could take the feel of a Lovecraft story and adapt it to film. Dagon is a insane bastardization of "Dagon" and "The Shadow over Insmuth". It works, though, because Gorden kept the bits of personal horror and dumped the actual story. He moved the dates, location and focus, but kept that same feeling of unavoidable fate (and a nasty one at that!). The same could be said for the Re-Animator series, Dreams in The Witch-House (part of the Masters of Horror series) and From Beyond. All of them were unfaithful to the actual story, but were very faithful to the Lovecraftian style of horror.
I'm hopeful for the del Toro version... but nothing I've seen of his directing skills indicate that he 'gets' Lovecraft... but then he's never done anything Lovecraftian, so maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.
Quote from: Ratatosk on October 08, 2007, 06:47:58 PM
The problem with Lovecraft is that most of his works are not able to be filmed like the story. Much of Lovecraft's appeal is in the words. When he speaks of a Squamish and Eldrich horror. its the squamish and eldrich part that tends to get the reader hooked... Squamish doesn't translate to the big screen.
I dunno. I liked his stories but disliked his writing style. Too try and drawn out for my taste.
But that's basically the problem with any book - movie adaptation, right? How do you capture the author's words visually and still retain the original feel?
Quote from: Professor Cramulus on October 08, 2007, 06:53:33 PM
Quote from: Ratatosk on October 08, 2007, 06:47:58 PM
The problem with Lovecraft is that most of his works are not able to be filmed like the story. Much of Lovecraft's appeal is in the words. When he speaks of a Squamish and Eldrich horror. its the squamish and eldrich part that tends to get the reader hooked... Squamish doesn't translate to the big screen.
I dunno. I liked his stories but disliked his writing style. Too try and drawn out for my taste.
But that's basically the problem with any book - movie adaptation, right? How do you capture the author's words visually and still retain the original feel?
Forsooth. I think it depends on how the book is written: a writer who drives the story using lots of visual language may be easier to put on film than someone like Lovecraft, whose writing tends to be highly introspective (and describes most horrible things as indescribable, dammit).
a good lovecraft story movie would be totally psychedelic .. well not psychedelic, but .. weird. like, blurry and hitchcock-like and like the aeon flux movie or "immortals" and sin city and even (though i suspect loads of people dislike this movie) "what dreams may come" .. it needs to look very surreal. like, impressionist, kind of. like you're viewing the way the character is viewing the world, not as an outside spectator.
Quote from: triple zero on October 08, 2007, 09:18:14 PM
a good lovecraft story movie would be totally psychedelic .. well not psychedelic, but .. weird. like, blurry and hitchcock-like and like the aeon flux movie or "immortals" and sin city and even (though i suspect loads of people dislike this movie) "what dreams may come" .. it needs to look very surreal. like, impressionist, kind of. like you're viewing the way the character is viewing the world, not as an outside spectator.
well said
and it would probably be directed by Kubrick or Werner Herzog or David Lynch or someone else who has "mastered" the art of holding one frigging shot for three solid minutes.
also, the monsters would rarely if ever be on screen. Like Blair Witch but with less shakeycam and more... well,
plot.
i never saw blairwitch? should i?
actually generally i don't like scary movies ;-) i liked evil dead. i liked braindead and bad taste (a littlebit, but not that time i was hungover). i really don't enjoy the actual scary horror stuff. i accidentally walked into "Audition" this one time. damn did i ever need a stiff drink after that one (it was a good whiskey).
i disagree about david lynch, because i feel he would make the story incomprehensible.
i dunno werner herzog, what did he make?
Quote from: triple zero on October 08, 2007, 09:33:41 PM
i never saw blairwitch? should i?
The first time I saw it I shit my pants.
But that was at a screening at my high school. They told us that it was an actual documentary, not fiction. I really enjoyed it that one time.
Quote
i disagree about david lynch, because i feel he would make the story incomprehensible.
agreed there.
Quote
i dunno werner herzog, what did he make?
a bunch of incomprehensible unwatchable art house films
both lynch, kubrick, and herzog aren't really good with straightforward narrative. But they
are good at using visual language to depict a character's internal state.
Which is why if I had to choose the director of The Mountains of Madness, and I had to choose between Lynch and, say, Monster Master Peter Jackson, I'd choose Lynch.
'cause Lovecraftian horror isn't so much a "holy shit, run!" kind of horror so much as it's a "That monster is related to me and there's nothing I can do to save myself" kind of horror.
i only saw "cube" and "clockwork orange" by kubrick (cube is by kubrick, right?)
both stories are reasonably follow-able, IMO ?
maybe it helped i read the book to clockwork orange as well. for my english high school literature list.. was very hard :) with all the strange language he used. took me a while to figure out what was meant by "the ol' in-n-out" :) o i was so innocent in those days hehe .. i used the blurb at the back of the book as a little rosetta stone for the first few chapters, cause it had both the "new speak" and an translation into regular english on the back.
Quote from: triple zero on October 08, 2007, 09:18:14 PM
a good lovecraft story movie would be totally psychedelic .. well not psychedelic, but .. weird. like, blurry and hitchcock-like and like the aeon flux movie or "immortals" and sin city and even (though i suspect loads of people dislike this movie) "what dreams may come" .. it needs to look very surreal. like, impressionist, kind of. like you're viewing the way the character is viewing the world, not as an outside spectator.
ftr, i actually like What Dreams May Come.
then, i suspect you liked "eternal sunshine on the spotless mind" as well?
(which was AWESOME, imo, specially the ending)
yes, i did like that one too.
ARE YOU SIDEKICK?
Quote from: triple zero on October 08, 2007, 10:09:12 PM
i only saw "cube" and "clockwork orange" by kubrick (cube is by kubrick, right?)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/
Cube is DEFINITELY not Kubrick
I really liked the silent film that the h p lovecraft historical society did for call of cthulhu.
im kinda interested to see what will come of this
I wonder, how will they portray the long descriptions of the creatures that Lovecraft describes as recorded in pictograms? They can't make a movie that has thirty minutes of archaeological analysis of some doodles on a wall...
...Or CAN they?!
Quote from: vexati0n on October 09, 2007, 12:03:47 AMyes, i did like that one too.
ARE YOU SIDEKICK?
i'm what now?
(i was expecting this post to make sense to me in the morning, but it didn't)
Quote from: triple zero on October 08, 2007, 09:18:14 PM
a good lovecraft story movie would be totally psychedelic .. well not psychedelic, but .. weird. like, blurry and hitchcock-like and like the aeon flux movie or "immortals" and sin city and even (though i suspect loads of people dislike this movie) "what dreams may come" .. it needs to look very surreal. like, impressionist, kind of. like you're viewing the way the character is viewing the world, not as an outside spectator.
I think Dagon and Dreams in the Witch House both did a respectable job of capturing the inevitableness of the protagonists plight and at the same time the heavy atmosphere that felt like reading Lovecraft.
Spike Jones would be a cool director for this.
Tarantino.
CTHULU MOTHERFUCKER, CAN YOU PRONOUNCE IT?
Fuck that.
You'd just get Cthulu, Nyarlotep, and Azathoth sitting around a table, talking about the sociopolitical ramifications of Three's Company, and whether Jack Tripper was actually gay or not.
...Hold on a second, that would be awesome.
Quote from: LMNO on October 10, 2007, 04:49:17 PM
...Hold on a second, that would be awesome.
:mittens:
Will Guillermo Del Torro find a way to make "TEKELI-LI" sound scary, and not just silly (the way it sounds in my head).
Cthulhu: And you know what they call a, uh, a Mwgl'nahfgh Fthagn outside of R'Lyeh?
Yog-Sothoth: They don't call it a Mwgl'nahfgh Fthagn?
Cthulhu: Nah, man, they don't have non-euclidian geometry, they wouldn't know what the fuck a Fhtaghn is.
Yog-Sothoth: What do they call it?
Cthulhu: They call it a "Quarter Pounder with Cheese"
Yog-Sothoth: "Quarter Pounder with Cheese"
Cthulhu: Thats right.
Yog-Sothoth: What do they call a Shoggoth?
Cthulhu: A Shoggoth's a Shoggoth, but they usually just scream from the undescribable horror instead.
:lulz:
:lulz: :lulz:
:mittens:
Quote from: triple zero on October 12, 2007, 12:14:13 PM
Cthulhu: And you know what they call a, uh, a Mwgl'nahfgh Fthagn outside of R'Lyeh?
Yog-Sothoth: They don't call it a Mwgl'nahfgh Fthagn?
Cthulhu: Nah, man, they don't have non-euclidian geometry, they wouldn't know what the fuck a Fhtaghn is.
Yog-Sothoth: What do they call it?
Cthulhu: They call it a "Quarter Pounder with Cheese"
Yog-Sothoth: "Quarter Pounder with Cheese"
Cthulhu: Thats right.
Yog-Sothoth: What do they call a Shoggoth?
Cthulhu: A Shoggoth's a Shoggoth, but they usually just scream from the undescribable horror instead.
My new short-term personal savior has been located.
Quote from: triple zero on October 12, 2007, 12:14:13 PM
Cthulhu: And you know what they call a, uh, a Mwgl'nahfgh Fthagn outside of R'Lyeh?
Yog-Sothoth: They don't call it a Mwgl'nahfgh Fthagn?
Cthulhu: Nah, man, they don't have non-euclidian geometry, they wouldn't know what the fuck a Fhtaghn is.
Yog-Sothoth: What do they call it?
Cthulhu: They call it a "Quarter Pounder with Cheese"
Yog-Sothoth: "Quarter Pounder with Cheese"
Cthulhu: Thats right.
Yog-Sothoth: What do they call a Shoggoth?
Cthulhu: A Shoggoth's a Shoggoth, but they usually just scream from the undescribable horror instead.
Layers of silly with not so subtle hints of Parody... perfect!
:thanks:
Quote from: triple zero on October 12, 2007, 12:14:13 PM
Cthulhu: And you know what they call a, uh, a Mwgl'nahfgh Fthagn outside of R'Lyeh?
Yog-Sothoth: They don't call it a Mwgl'nahfgh Fthagn?
Cthulhu: Nah, man, they don't have non-euclidian geometry, they wouldn't know what the fuck a Fhtaghn is.
Yog-Sothoth: What do they call it?
Cthulhu: They call it a "Quarter Pounder with Cheese"
Yog-Sothoth: "Quarter Pounder with Cheese"
Cthulhu: Thats right.
Yog-Sothoth: What do they call a Shoggoth?
Cthulhu: A Shoggoth's a Shoggoth, but they usually just scream from the undescribable horror instead.
That was the most gorgeous thing I have seen online in weeks....
I think I just orgasmed. :fnord:
That was quite awesome. Someone needs to write a script.