Guillermo del Toro wears a class ring for Miskatonic University on his hand, the same finger as his wedding band. The school is fictional, invented by cult horror author HP Lovecraft, the long-dead, depressive racist whose innovations in the field of dark fantasy would inspire virtually every artist working in that genre, directly or indirectly. Extremely directly, in del Toro’s case, as you can cite explicit references in at least half his films, from the space-dwelling octopus Gods in Hellboy to the cross-species romance of The Shape of Water. But del Toro’s dream project, a full tilt adaptation of Lovecraft’s only novel At the Mountains of Madness, has remained forever out of his reach. As del Toro puts it, several years of his life went into realizing its creation, up to a development deal with Universal Studios and James Cameron, a completed script, actors ready to shoot, production designs completed and locations scouted, only to lose it all at the last minute. The film was too costly, reputedly priced at over 175 million dollars, and bereft of many of the qualities a studio needs to profit from such an expensive film, such as a happy ending or a PG-13 rating. Unwilling to compromise on these, del Toro found himself at an impasse with the studio, and the project was cancelled. But del Toro says he’ll never give up hope on it, and will wear the Miskatonic ring until his vision for At the Mountains of Madness is realized, or he’ll be buried with it on his finger.
Of course, the script is out there. It’s readily available online, and you can read it for yourself. It’s rare a film gets made once the script has been disseminated so widely (and within the fan community, this one has been widely read), so at this point, it seems unlikely At the Mountains of Madness ever gets made, at least with the scope and ambition del Toro had envisioned. So, for now, all we’ve got is a script, and one that was met online with a fairly mixed reaction, to be honest. Despite the presenting as more or less the ultimate Lovecraft film, del Toro’s script is significantly different from the novella it’s based on. And while it maintains most of the hallmarks of the Cosmic Horror genre (madness-inducing horrors, blasphemous revelation, doomed cast of characters), the tone is quite a bit broader, certainly more action-packed, and I wouldn’t blame any of the long-dead racist’s fans for saying it completely missed the mark. But on the other hand, I pretty much loved it. This article will be a deep dive on del Toro’s version of the story, and as usual, I would suggest reading it yourself, if this is the sort of thing you’re interested in. This is a pretty fun one, and even if it ends up not working for you, it’s a wild ride. Otherwise, here’s how it all goes down.
The script opens in 1939, with Australian fisherman finding a derelict whaling ship, the Arkham out of Massachusetts. Shades of the Mary Celeste, and other famous ghost ships. The Arkham is not completely empty though, as the salvage team is promptly attacked (and indeed, a few of them are murdered) by an axe-wielding madman hiding inside. This is our protagonist, Professor William Dyer, a role that Tom Cruise was slated to play. Cruise is an odd choice for the role. A bit of online research states that Chris Pine and James McAvoy were up for it, and in my opinion, both are better fits for this cerebral academic character. Cruise was kind of figuring himself out at the time, between being mocked in the tabloids (and on South Park) and dealing with scientology-related bad press, so maybe he was willing to take a risk on a less heroic character, and maybe all that made the gamble less appealing for Universal as well. I could see it of a piece with his character in War of the Worlds, I suppose, playing someone outmatched by the enormity of the thing.
Lovecraft’s novel is structured as a missive written by Dyer, urging the upcoming Starkweather Moore Antarctic expedition to abandon their trip, and that appears here as well, with a nod to Frankenstein’s arctic opening. Dyer finds himself speaking to Starkweather and recounting his story of what happened to the vanished Miskatonic expedition, missing now for nine years. We flashback to 1930: Dyer is a young scholar, aiming to join the college’s antarctic research expedition, but torn by his commitment to his pregnant wife Anne, who, in the script’s single instance of having a woman, begs him not to go. About a page and a half, that’s how much Anne gets. This overwhelmingly male perspective here is accurate to the period and to Lovecraft, but probably didn’t make the prospect any more appealing to Universal.
Anne’s objections are quickly dashed by Professor Lake, the script’s closest thing to a human villain. Lake is from the novella, although as portrayed here, he’s got much more in common with the familiar horror movie type, the two-faced scientist that doesn’t care who has to die in pursuit of fame and fortune. It’s not a terrifically rounded character (none of them are), but the right hambone actor could have had a real feast with it. It sounds like they might have offered it to Liam Neeson. Lake shows Dyer the real reason for the expedition, a recently unearthed fossil of an unknown star-headed creature, come from the remotes wastes of the Antarctic. And with his intellectual curiosity piqued, Dyer signs on up.
Now aboard the Arkham, we meet the rest of the large cast. There’s nearly twenty named characters in At the Mountains of Madness (with twice as many serving as extras/fodder), and as soon as we started getting to know them, I got excited to see how they’d all die. It’s a wide array of sailors and scientists with names like Pabodie, Moulton, Gedney and Ropes, sometimes with one defining trait for distinction (a thick New York accent, a pair of brothers, etc). All in all, I was reminded, not for the last time of, John Carpenter’s The Thing, and its cast of similar, bearded weirdos at the edge of the world. Of the ensemble, a few stand outs in terms of importance are Danforth, Dyer’s best buddy and maybe a bit of comic relief (what little there is), Atwood, the ship’s chaplain who is on hand for the religious conversations AtMoM is interested in having later, and Larsen, easily the second lead. Larsen is a Canadian dog handler, a big badass outdoorsman, and quite obviously the role del Toro wrote for frequent collaborator Ron Perlman. This was clear enough while reading, as Larsen is pretty much just Hellboy, and a bit of quick googling confirms that Perlman was all set to play it.
The script moves at a quick clip, and once done introducing the crew, we’re halfway to Antarctica. del Toro ladles on the old time superstition, talking about the blank places on the map (where monsters live), stuff like that. Lake receives a telegraph stating Dyer’s wife and child have died during childbirth (in case you were worried about that), but he opts to withhold this from Dyer, as it will distract him. Dyer himself is having nightmares about infants with tentacles and a faceless Dark Man walking a snowscape, all very ominous. The two ships (the Arkham and the Miskatonic) go through a cloud bank, and everyone is knocked unconscious, only to wake up an indistinct amount of time later (it seems to have been several days), lost in the icy southern waters, and in the shadow of the titular range of mountains, a range of jagged black spires looming above them, where they soon run aground.
I mentioned The Thing earlier, and it’s about here, page 30 or so, that it becomes clear that del Toro’s script is as indebted to the Carpenter film as it is to the original novella. Rips it off, if you were being ungenerous. Many of the iconic scenes of that film are duplicated here, and while I initially was a bit disappointed that it was leaning so heavily on it, It eventually becomes clear that AtMoM is going for something we actually haven’t seen much before. This is The Thing as a massive event picture, huge in a way that film never could be, in a way that is antithetical to how it even works. And despite being obviously well-versed in Lovecraft, this script is very much not trying to duplicate his plotting or reserved tone. This is much more along the lines of something like Jurassic Park, or producer James Cameron’s Aliens, and despite some dark philosophy and bleakness, whether it succeeds or not is a question of whether you can accept this larger than life take on the material. A lot of Lovecraft fans online couldn’t, and I was quickly able to find a lot of takes that del Toro fundamentally didn’t ‘get’ the original story. I would counter that he does, he’s just doing something very different here, using Lovecraft as a starting point for a rip-roaring horror adventure flick. These are rare enough, and I don’t think there’s any that are both this huge in scale and as extreme in their horror trappings. Except Prometheus.
The crew of the Arkham begins to discover many disquieting things about their location. The Miskatonic is nowhere to be seen. Once melted, the ice locking the ship in reforms instantly, an indication that they’re in a temporal anomaly wherein time is passing much faster inside than out (kind of like that water planet in Interstellar). and beneath the water line, the ice is lined with etched stone obelisks. These turn out to be sarcophagi, and once opened up they reveal the corpses of centuries dead creatures preserved in salt brine. They are the same star-headed creatures seen in the fossil. There’s a disturbing autopsy sequence (like in The Thing), whereupon Lake reveals that these creatures could live in land, sea and air, and had hyper intelligent brains.
Meanwhile, Larsen and his buddy, a Dane named Gunnarsson, go out hunting to feed the pack of sled dogs, and happen upon a field of eight-foot tall albino penguins, born without eyes. These creepy critters are straight out of the book, and it would be easy to imagine del Toro’s take on them. They kill one, find its internal organs are all ‘pale, weirdly deformed, and more geometric than organic’. Great gross stuff here. The dogs start freaking out, a disturbing piping noise plays on the wind, and everyone gets lost in a fog bank. You get the familiar horror movie sequence, where barking dogs run off into the fog only to yip in pain and go silent. Gunnarson finds a dog cut in half, whose entrails turn into writhing tendrils and pseudopods, and shoots a series of claws and mouths out of its neck. Gunnarson ‘disappears into a mass of vibrating flesh, fusing with it’.
This is a shoggoth, and they are the principle monsters of AtMoM. Blobs of protean, oozing flesh that can assume any form and merge with any organic tissue they touch. Again, we’re dealing with The Thing iconography, especially in this brazen early use of sled dogs. Gunnarson, once consumed, becomes the human disguise for the shoggoths, appearing for the rest of the script as a familiar face that ambushes victims once they turn their back. It attacks Larsen, who makes an improbable escape through the ice, an a way that suggests he’s dead but clearly means he’s alive, if you’ve ever seen a movie before. It also establishes that the shoggoths can’t handle salt, and will avoid ocean waters. Gunnarsson-thing returns to the Arkham, incognito. Ooh, that’s a lot like The Thing.
If you’re unfamiliar with the larger reveal of At the Mountains of Madness, it is as follows: in the millennia before human beings existed, Earth was populated by an interstellar race of star-headed creatures known only as The Old Ones. They were far more intelligent than us, and they built an advanced (but still quite alien) civilization in the mountainous regions of present-day Antarctica, which thrived for millions of years. They utilized a slave workforce to accomplish this, in the form of the shoggoths, and in time, they created all animal life on Earth, including us. Ultimately, the shoggoths revolted, and the ensuing conflict brought down both races. This information is imparted in the novella as a series of sociological observations Dyer makes upon inspecting the frescos decorating their long dead mountain lair. This narrative is mostly maintained in the script, though to get it across, we’re naturally more reliant on spoken exposition and ‘knowledge machines’.
Lake leads a group up to the mountain city, in a pair of small planes, their stated purpose to triangulate the location so they can escape, or some such bullshit. Dyer, notably, stays behind, having discovered his wife’s death and Lake’s deception. As such, Lake becomes the protagonist for this section of the film, discovering the backstory in a amphitheater full of genetic blueprints of all animal life on Earth and of course, a laser that beams visions into his brain. Everyone investigating the city comes to a horrible death here, either by being zapped by less benign machine lasers or devoured by shoggoths. Lake is the last to go.
Meawhile, Gunnarson is converting most of the remaining crew to shoggoths, and Dyer, after some more visions of the Dark Man, is aiding in the Old One autopsy, only to be shocked when the corpses awaken, and began performing an autopsy right back. This is the scariest sequences in the script. Dyer ends up between the reawakened Old Ones and the blobby, many-faced shoggoth, and the two creatures immediately attack one another, allowing Dyer to escape with Larsen, still alive. These two go off together to have some ice cave adventures, killing more penguins and discussing what the hell’s going on. These are some decent bits, aided by knowing Tom Cruise and Ron Perlman would be playing the roles, although I do wonder if Cruise would have really been cool with getting schooled on how to Man Up by a 60-year-old TV actor who keeps calling him ‘Egghead’.
The third act begins with a pretty enormous setpiece, as the surviving half of the mountain expedition arrive back to the Arkham. They’re surprised, in the air, to see the crew of sailors on the ground standing in an odd formation waiting below, and even more surprised to discover that they’re all duplicate versions of Gunnarson. Once the plane lands, the Gunnarson things swarm the plane, congealing into a massive blob of protoplasmic tissue and filling up the tube with writhing flesh, devouring anyone it touches. I love this scene, it really is like something out of Jurassic Park except with a gigantic formless flesh mass, all eyestalks and dog heads at the end of tentacles. The majority of the cast is wiped out here, and the few survivors are rescued by Dyer and Larsen, who show up at the last minute with shotguns shooting rock salt(!). We do another The Thing sequence, where everyone has to prove they’re not shoggoths by eating salt (some of them are shoggoths) and we’re left with Dyer, Larsen, Danforth and Atwood. They decide they have to do whatever it takes to stop the shoggoths from escaping, by using dynamite to blow the ship free.
So, we’re in more conventional genre waters here, despite the flesh piles. But AtMoM isn’t done be difficult. Alone on the ship, Atwood (the chaplain, again) finds himself confronted by what appears to be professor Lake, but is quickly revealed to be a Lake-thing, speaking with the voice of the shoggoths. It says:
Lake is here. With us. He wants you to know it was them - the Old Ones, who brought life to this planet, not your God! They created life many times, on many worlds! First, out of hunger. Then, out of boredom they created men! Yes! They made you: a house pet! And gave you doubts and fears and hopes and faith. It made you more entertaining to watch - like a puppy chasing its tail. Go on, little man. Finish your prayer. You know that no one is listening.
That is some Iron Maiden album cover style cheese. Kind of like if Lovecraft had written Deep Rising. Broad though it may be, I do enjoy the way AtMoM employs its blasphemy, here and throughout the script. It presents Christianity as an overlay on the Old Ones history, with all the major aspects just bastardizations of reality. The shoggoths, for example, are Legion, the biblical demon that is one made of many. Anyway, Atwood gets devoured. Larsen, whom del Toro clearly loves, is given the only heroic, on-his-own-terms death in the script, even giving the shoggoths a parting bon mot about dynamite as he blows up an ice crevasse, freeing the ship. Danforth and Dyer race escape shoggoth attack from all sides, and a big action sequence follows. The capper is the God of the Shoggoths is awakened from behind the mountains, and it ends up being Lovecraft’s big marquee name, Cthulhu himself. This is pretty shameless. I’m rooting hard for the script a this point, but they’d need some damn good execution here. Cthulhu attempts to stop this ship, but through dumb luck, it barely slips through his grasp. Danforth gets infected and dies, and Dyer finds himself back among the real world, madly attacking the salvage team from the opening of the script, a ruined madman screaming about impossible monsters.
There’s a bit more, an epilogue of remarkable bleakness, actually. Starkweather doesn’t believe Dyer, and proceeds with his expedition South. After embarking, he receives word that Dyer has hung himself. The script ends with Starkweather, alone in the frozen wastes, his team vanished, and the Dark Man from Dyer’s dream approaching, the biblical Legion made flesh. Never content to imply when it can explain, AtMoM ends with a bible verse from Revelations. Pretty baller, in a teenage boy kind of way.
I can acknowledge that this is not quite the movie people were expecting, based on movies like Pan’s Labyrinth, and especially if you’ve read much Lovecraft. I can also see exactly why Universal got cold feet, as it would definitely take some balls to spend 175 million dollars on this, especially ten years ago. It has a bit more in common with the film del Toro did instead, Pacific Rim, than I think anyone would have expected. It shares that film’s love of monsters, its ambitious world-building, and potentially, most of its problems. It also shares, incidentally, quite a bit with Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s 2012 Alien prequel, which is quiet clearly inspired by At the Mountains of Madness, and has multiple scenes that are staged in a very similar fashion to what’s in this script. del Toro has said in interviews that Prometheus was pretty much the nail in the coffin for this film. So, it’s not even true any longer to lament that there’s nothing else like it out there. But I had a lot of fun reading it. It was a good old time. I’d like more Aliens-style horror epics in general, and I imagine it would have been a real mindfuck for the kids who managed to see it. Of all the scripts I’ve read for this column, this has been my favorite so far, somewhat in spite of itself. I wish we got this one. And so does del Toro. As a huge creepy Lovecraft dork, he seems committed to this in heart. Look at this upsetting life size statue of Lovecraft he has in his library! If the opportunity presents itself, I hope he goes for it.
Check out the last unproduced script review, Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men From Mars