Heh, in that article GuanoLad linked to, if I replaced “movie” with “video game” it would perfectly describe the latter genre’s current state of the art as well.
BTW, At The Mountains of Madness does have at least one pretty graphic scene:
When they’re examining the destroyed camp, they find that the revived Outer Ones had carefully and slowly dissected a living human being.
I read that article, and I can’t really disagree with anything the guy said concerning studios not getting rewarded for the risks they take. I also recall a few months back, when the Avatar Blu-Ray came out along with the accompanying marketing blitz, being annoyed that this box office smash was being jammed down my throat again, but I guess I wasn’t giving Fox credit for having taken the financial risk they did. Movies are a lot like pharmaceuticals in that regard.
And the point about big price tags drawing unwanted attention before a film is released is spot on as well, and I think del Toro ignores current economic realities when he asks for $150 million to make a horror film.
Doesn’t this describe Paranormal Activity? And that earned over $150,000,000.
Tom Cruise is entirely capable of playing a character who may have slipped over into madness and desperation (and back). He did so in Magnolia, Vanilla Sky, and on Oprah’s couch. 
John Carpenter’s The Thing got an R-rating.
Of course, it might be the two shots in the head and the two chopped-off hands that did it. But all the other blood and gore (and goop) in that film was from an obviously highly fictionalized alien creature. I suspect it got its R-rating from copious Alien Gore
“The Thing” predated the PG-13 rating by 2 years. It would probably get a PG-13 today, based on gore at least - I don’t know how many “fucks” it takes to go from PG-13 to R.
The PG-13 isn’t relevant, and wasn’t the part I was arguing – it’s the “R” rating.
And I wondered if he was interested in this project for religious reasons.
But you said “The Thing” was rated R in response to the question “Can you really get an R rating through mature concepts with no boobs or blood?” I’d certainly interpret that question to refer to current movies & ratings, so referencing the rating of a movie that was released before the PG-13 rating existed isn’t really great evidence. Unless you’re taking the position that every movie that was rated R before PG-13 existed would still be rated R, and not PG-13, under the current guidelines.
I’d love to see a really good adaptation of a Lovecraft story but I take Dex’s point that it’s the reader’s own imagination that provides much of the horror in his work and that actual depictions of the Old Ones, etc. usually disappoint. Oddly enough I think the most faithful and effective adaptation I’ve ever seen is the micro-budget Call of Cthulhu. Filmed as if it were a silent made in the 20s it does a wonderful job of conveying that sense of unease and mounting dread that one gets with Lovecraft, although here again (and understandably in this case) the depiction of Cthulhu at the end leaves much to be desired (to put it kindly).
It’s a pity about the del Toro project though, I would have loved to see what he would have come up with; I found some of the monsters in Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hellboy films quite pleasing.
Cthulhu should not be never-entirely-seen like the monster in Torchwood or, worse yet, Galactacus in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. But it might do – perhaps a clever cinematographer could work with this – to have him never visible clearly. I.e., he could loom, and his general outline and even anatomical details would be clear enough, but it would always be shadowed or unfocused enough to suggest subconsciously that you’re not seeing all there is.
:eek: Are you insane? The Thing is probably the goriest movie I’ve ever seen. Honestly, if the exact same movie were released today I’d imagine that Carpenter would have to fight with the MPAA to rate it R instead of NC-17.
Quite possibly - I’m actually reading a Lovecraft collection at the moment.
But a lot of it is alien gore, not human gore. War movies have a lot more human gore.
Hijack: If not del Toro, who should direct an At the Mountains of Madness adaptation? David Lynch? Tim Burton? Dominic Sena?
Alien/human hybrid gore. Meaning a lot of human looking people getting dismembered in increasingly violent ways. Have you completely forgotten about the reverse chestbuster scene?
Marley23: I think both *The Case of Charles Dexter Ward *and The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath are longer than At the Mountains of Madness.
Only by the familiar Euclidean word-counting arithmetic of this planet and solar system.
I think some of the Brian Yuzna / Stuart Gordon films came close.
Re-Animator and Dagon in particular. Stuart Gordon also directed a fairly good version of “Dreams in the Witch House” for the “Masters of Horror” series.
Yuzna and Gordon set these three adaptations in modern times, and they were very loose adaptations at that, so they could compensate for the more “unfilmable” parts of HPL’s stories.
I haven’t seen the “Call of Cthulhu” silent film that some other posters have mentioned, but I’d really like to.
Two other films I’d really like to see are the Roger Corman adaptations of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Dunwich Horror.
I hear they’re mediocre films at best, but if memory serves, they’re the two earliest film versions of HPL, and so my curiosity is piqued.
Nice one.