Even though he's readying "Hellboy 2: The Golden Army" for production in January, director Guillermo Del Toro is already heavily considering that his long-developing adaptation of HP Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" might be next on his schedule.
Talking with IGN UK, he says "Mountains of Madness, which is a project I've had for several years, if it comes to fruition I'd rather do that immediately while the iron is hot. But it all depends on so many factors -- creative, personal -- that every time I predict what I'm going to do next, I fail".
The book itself deals with an Antarctic expedition who come upon evidence of highly evolved alien creatures who helped create life on Earth with the help of formless subservient creatures. Those creatures eventually rebelled and wiped them out, and the one expedition member who sees one is driven almost completely insane.
Lovecraft's unique style has proven to be difficult to adapt on film in the past, this story in particular filled with references to the author's other works and has popularised the concept of ancient astronauts.
del Toro says "The albino penguins, the gigantic city... The hard thing about that novel is it's very much a record of an expedition, so the narrative is brilliant in that it's a little bit dry but it's not character-based. There are many characters that you don't know -- you don't even know who the hell the expedition is [made up of] until you have it referenced in another book of Lovecraft's. You need to create the character dynamics and the arc of the story, which is not in the book".
He adds "The horror in the book is only ambiguous and it's kept open at the end. And you can still capture that atmosphere, but then you have to take it and go to a climax [in the movie]. Which in the book is really a climax by almost using negative space in the narrative; it's what you don't see that makes it. That essentially goes against the very essence of show business, because you don't show anything. I think that what we're doing is good and it's as good as we can [do when] adapting Lovecraft. But it's a project that's been with us for several years now. It's not an easy project to set up"
