Guillermo del Toro’s At the Mountains of Madness may go down in history as the greatest unmade movie ever, up there with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune or Tim Burton’s Superman Lives. First announced in 2010, the Shape of Water director had been trying to bring H.P. Lovecraft’s terrifying novella to life for almost two decades. But each subsequent update has proven that the story, which follows a group of explorers in Antarctica who discover the existence of a civilization older than the human race, may truly be unfilmable.
Still, that hasn’t stopped fans from hoping that the impossible would happen, and that At the Mountains of Madness would be one of the rare unmade del Toro projects to escape development hell (we still think about you, Justice League Dark). And when the director shared some gnarly CGI test footage for the film three years ago, the idea of del Toro’s At the Mountains of Madness movie seemed more possible than ever. But del Toro, who is making the press rounds for his lavish new horror epic Frankenstein, may have finally laid those hopes to rest.
