come anticipate guillermo del toro's "at the mountains of madness" with me

it's in 3D
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/45949

Depending on the script, I'm fine with this one being 3D.

All these 3-D movies discriminate against those of us with lazy/wandering/crossed eyes

and those of us who think 3D is a bit bollocks

Lovecraft is so fundamentally un-adaptable to the screen would be happy if all rights to his material were withheld from adaptation in perpetuity tbh

Can't wait for the film to stop dead for thirty minutes while one guy explains to the other what the drawings all mean.

lol

Lovecraft is so fundamentally un-adaptable to the screen would be happy if all rights to his material were withheld from adaptation in perpetuity tbh

― Master of the Manly Ballad (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, July 29, 2010 2:47 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

i agree with the premise here but i think it could be fun to try

who knows, something weird and cool could come out of an attempt at an unsolvable problem

"It's a huge transparent monster that's eating a bunch of monstrous penguins!"

"You're HIGH."

(Don't get me wrong, I can't wait to see this too -- like s1ocki, it's not going to be a question of a faithful adaptation but how they hell they figure this out.)

re: lovecraft adaptations that uber retro call of cthulu from a few years ago was pretty cool imo

I WILL JOIN YOU IN THE ANTICIPATING OF THIS FILM...

http://lolthulhu.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/king_xolotl-mountains.jpg

Lovecraft is so fundamentally un-adaptable to the screen would be happy if all rights to his material were withheld from adaptation in perpetuity tbh

I think it could be done, it's just no one's done it yet

best lovecraft adaptations have been the ones that go gonzo (reanimator, from beyond)

the best king adaptations don't really capture the spirit of the originals either tho (carrie, the shining)

i mean most of the scariest movies around do it by NOT showing, don't see why books should have the monopoly on that

ah Reanimator, yeah that's great. maybe I should've specified Cthulhu-mythos

hope this happens. would be so great to see hellboy II quality monsteration in 3D, plus mind-bending visions of the gibbering fear of course. disagree that lovecraft is unfilmable tho. that h.p. lovecraft society silent version of call of cthulhu from a few years back was faithful to the source and worked quite well. deliberately quaint and cheap by necessity, but i could see the same basic story materials and vibe making a very satisfying mainstream suspense/horror flick.

One of the things about the book; everything just out of sight - sounds, trails, hints, scrawlings, um, inverted burial of scientists in anarctic tundra. And massive alien architecture. Not in your face horror so much.

Supposedly Dagon is a good Chthulu-mythos adaptation, based on The Shadow Over Innsmouth, but I haven't seen it.

lovecraft is 'unfilmable' in the sense that a lot of the elder gods mythos revolves around physically impossible things--angles that dont exist in 3d space, colors that shouldnt be seen by the human eye

but i dont think that means no one should try. and i think del toro has the best shot of almost anyone working to actually make it work

yeah, dagon is awesome! one of my favorite movies. operates w/in the mythos and tells a great story. lead actor is atrocious though, as is the woman who plays his wife (a smaller role). doesn't bother me, but they're awful enough to warrant an advance notice.

a lot of folks rep for dagon but I couldn't get into it. starts off well, early stuff with the townspeople is creepy but goes downhill from there imo. final scenes get wild but it's too little too late.

Yeah, I loved Dagon.

angles that dont exist in 3d space, colors that shouldnt be seen by the human eye

yeah, but i think that these kinds of things can be suggested, even half-depicted. you know, like mc escher drew pictures of things that couldn't physically exist.

Angles that don't exist in 3D space - isn't this what CGI was invented for?

was watching hellboy the other day, the strange massive beast floating around in the beginning when rasputin opens the portal was def a nod to an elder god

true. lots of nods to the old ones in mignola's comics to begin with though. much more so than in the movies.

isn't this what CGI was invented for?

this is what multi-million dollar 3D CGI was invented for

i.e., hell yes

Yeah, that was kinda what I was getting at.

(I have yet to see a nu-3D movie but I imagine the possibilities for non-Euclidean architecture could be mind-boggling)

if del toro can't do this no one can

i guess? i mean, when i say "cant exist in 3d space" what i mean is "cant physically exist such that the human mind can process them" which is what i always understood to be going on in hpl stories. like--what i imagine those descriptions to be is of stuff that literally cant be imagined, in some sense. its what i love about lovecraft!

thats an xxxxp or something

with 3d you probably can't drive people mad, but you could make a few of them barf.

here's hoping for some barf.

come anticipate assayas' "at the mountains of madness" with me

I took it more to be like, perceptual illusions that fucked with the human mind's concepts of space and time.

x-post to max

would be funny if they advertised this film with a disclaimer that seeing it might DRIVE YOU INSANE

too bad brakhage is dead

contenderizer and i are talking about the same cthulhu film i think.

there are some other ones floating around that are utter shit tho

they should have a nurse outside the theater in case anyone DIES OF FRIGHT

this one?

xp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHuY2wXTd0o

i have that one on dvd, it's bitchin'

pretty faithful, too!

3d really needs to embrace it's chintzy william castle heritage

as soon as i make this argt i realize i don't know what i'm talking about

no way you're totally right!

think about it! dudes dressed up as shoggoths popping out of the aisles at the right moment of the movie. it would be awesome.

miike should be making 3d movies instead of cameron

I took it more to be like, perceptual illusions that fucked with the human mind's concepts of space and time.

x-post to max

― procedurally generated pidyn (Masonic Boom), Thursday, July 29, 2010 5:23 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

aw no man i always conceived of those descriptions as like... stuff completely incomprehensible by the human mind. not 'illusions' but i dunno. crazy n-dimensional stuff of which humans can only grasp a portion of. i like reading him next to irritating hard sci-fi authors who are super concerned w/ making their stuff scientifically accurate to a certain extent, b/c hpl goes in the completely opposite direction--if its not literally impossible w/in the realm of scientific thought than he doesnt care

my reading/interpretation follows max's - always thought this was key to the Elder Gods/Cthulhu mythos stuff, that these are things that are beyond the grasp of our pitifully limited consciousnesses, and thus when we come into contact with them, our minds are broken, are souls crushed, etc.

our souls

OK, I see what you mean. Kind of like the bit in Cosmos where Carl Sagan talks about the Tesseract and shows that weird hypercube with the 45% angles and says "now imagine if all the angles were 90%" - that it's hard to perceptually grasp, but you can imagine it. I do think there are ways of getting around that, if it's cleverly done.

I suppose what I mean by "perceptual illusion" is that the brain can't quite render it properly, so it's the kind of thing that shifts every time you look at it, in ways that it shouldn't shift if it were a natural angle.

(But then again, I always think of the towers of the Barbican of being vaguely Lovecraftian because their angles aren't 90% at the corners, so they seem to be further away and closer than they appear as you walk up towards them, because the brain keeps trying to straighten them.)

(But then again, I always think of the towers of the Barbican of being vaguely Lovecraftian because their angles aren't 90% at the corners, so they seem to be further away and closer than they appear as you walk up towards them, because the brain keeps trying to straighten them.)

Had this after a Christmas drink round there once.

No, it's not the drink, the Barbican tower really is like that. I went to a party in a flat in it, and it's just not quite square.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/85/258902697_c315f904e9.jpg

^^^^^^^puny human brane cannot comprehend

Christ, thank God for that. I was busy worrying about the nameless horror that was going to confront me at every corner, but it was just an architectural quirk. (Actually wasn't the house in The Haunting built like that? That film allus gave me the willies as well).

xpost No!!!!! (Leaves final insane thoughts on stylogram and sends to cousin)

ya i agree with max/shakey

i think you could think of some fun ways to suggest that shit though, i mean what HP lovecraft is also talking about is stuff that shouldn't literally be even write-aboutable so

can't remember the plot to this story, but i know the typical lovecraft arc - is this is going to be 90 minutes of atmosphere and then 5 minutes of face-ripping CGI?

A huge part of the story in this one is basically just the protagonists exploring and figuring out the history of the Elder Things by deciphering murals

good

xpost -- Thus my reference to that above y'see. :-D

they're probably gonna have to sex it up a bit to make the movie more palatable for most people. hopefully del toro will at least keep the mutant penguins!

by "sex it up" i of course mean "give the monsters boobs"

Or they could just adapt this

Meantime, this actually looks of possible interest.

http://www.ibtimes.com/data/articleimgs/42030-people-guillermo-del-toro.jpg

"the tits on the mutant penguins will be truly extraordinary"

xpost -- have fun with the sneak preview.

"This scenario is a complex one. Mood and confusion play large parts in the evolving story—confusion over loyalties, allegiances, identities, and even the morality of duty. In the end the investigators find great responsibilities in their hands, and discover that the burden is not one they can ever put down."

find out what happens when explorers stop being polite...and start getting real

that's in ref. to Ned's link a few posts back

Lengthy interview with del Toro, contains this:

DNY: As director, you could have gone to work for Warner Bros, doing a Wizard of Oz movie, and, I’ve heard, the studio wanted you to resurrect Superman...

Del Toro: There were other projects [he laughs].

DNY: That’s diplomatic. Why did you instead choose At the Mountains of Madness, a much harder picture to get greenlit?

Del Toro : I came out of The Hobbit, and it was the biggest heartbreak I’ve experienced as a filmmaker, because I will never know what that movie would have been. I was very mindful that I didn’t want to have a rebound movie, as happens sometimes when somebody comes off a long romance. There were very big, lucrative, beautiful projects on the table, and I was developing one of them with Jim Cameron. In my stubborn fashion, I slipped Jim the script, again, when we were meeting on that other project. He said, you still want to do that? To his credit, he said, well, let’s pursue that instead. This is the movie I most want to do. I haven’t done horror in a long time. Devil’s Backbone tries to make the ghost a victim, and not a scary character. Blade 2 is more action than horror. I really love the genre and last time I did a horror film was Mimic, and that was not a horror for the right reasons. That’s a muscle I want to flex. Frankenstein has the mitigating factor that for a length of the narrative, you favor the monster. For horror to work, you have to be afraid. You have to keep the monster in a black and white light. I mostly love monsters too much to see them in that light, but Lovecraft allows me to.

DNY: Because the villain is an otherworldly species?

Del Toro: Because the proportion is so big. When the monster has a dimension that allows you to humanize it, that’s the route I usually want to go. The cosmic proportions of the Lovecraft horror are so immense, it forces you to find humanity in other aspects of the tale. You can keep the monster inhuman, remote and scary, which is a great benefit.

DNY: Universal needed to be convinced to make this film, which is a bold play. I’ve heard there was a meeting with you, Jim, Ron Meyer and his Universal execs that swung the deal. How did you walk away with a yes?

Del Toro: Adam Fogelson and Donna Langley have always been friends of the project. The screenplay that is on the internet is an old screenplay, and the one I gave to Jim and Universal is different. When I came back from The Hobbit, I gave my Jimmy Stewart Mr. Smith Goes to Washington speech at Universal. I pitch with heart on sleeve, and Donna and Adam were moved, liked the new take and said, let’s develop it hard. But I wanted to be shooting by June next year. I didn’t want to let another year go by without shooting, it made no sense. So Jim, Jon Landau, Rae Sanchini, came with me for that big meeting. Jim and I were able to do a double tag team, talking about the world and the experience that Mountains would be. We found new ways for them to see it, and they agreed to investigate it further. We are not green lit, we are still budgeting and designing, and we are partners on this. I believe in my heart we are going to be making this movie in June of next year. We are budgeting the creatures and met with Spectral Motion and ILM, where Dennis Muren told me the sweetest words ever when he said, no one has ever seen monsters like this. That was truly one of the highlights of my fat life, a demigod like Muren saying that.

Nothing much new but:

In a conversation with 24 Frames Monday, Del Toro said he's actively engaged with the project and moving ahead with the tale of the mysteries and monsters on an Antarctic expedition. In fact, just last week Del Toro met with studio Universal for the so-called summit meeting in which he walked executives through his concepts and models for the movie. The script is also ready, he said.

So how soon could shooting begin? This summer, he hopes, and possibly as early as June, according to the filmmaker.

And lest you think producer James Cameron is simply putting his name on it while he's off working on "Avatar 2", think again: The "Terminator" director was present for the summit meeting and has been offering Del Toro some notes.

"In his subtle style he said to me, 'I have a few notes, but I have one fatal flaw [that I see in the script],'" Del Toro recalled. "He pointed out one thing that was big. I've been thinking about this for 35 years, and he pointed out something I'd never seen."

"There's not enough of that mystical rainforest giggling children shit."

man i wish i liked gdt more as a storyteller... he's smart and has great taste and has his heart in the right place but with a couple exceptions his movies are usually kinda bad

great del toro profile from new yorker, has some info on this:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/07/110207fa_fact_zalewski

shub niggurath's clit

Can someone debunk the Tom Cruise lead rumors so I can relax and know this movie will be excellent?

Even though he would guarantee the movie actually being made which would be nice. But I just don't want him on screen.

tekeli-li tekeli-li

Well, no need to fret over Tom Cruise,I guess . . .

After three months of deliberation, Universal Pictures, the studio that gave del Toro money for pre-production creature designs, has remained unwilling to give the director a greenlight, citing concerns over the film’s budget and likely R rating. On Monday, del Toro withdrew from the negotiations, and that night at ten-thirty he sent me a short, mournful e-mail:

Madness has gone dark. The ‘R’ did us in.

Del Toro had told me that he would not compromise on the film’s rating, even though a film rated PG-13 would have a much easier time attracting a mass audience. “Madness,” as he imagined it, would not be particularly gory, but he insisted that he needed the artistic freedom “to make it really, really uncomfortable and nasty.” Del Toro had hoped that a greenlight for “Madness” would mark a new golden age for horror films:

Del Toro envisaged “Madness” as a “hard R” epic, shot in 3-D, with a blockbuster budget. Creating dozens of morphing creatures would be expensive, and much of the film needed to be shot somewhere that approximated Antarctica; one of the most disquieting aspects of Lovecraft’s novella is that the explorers are being pursued by monsters in a vast frozen void, and del Toro wanted to make the first horror movie on the scale of a David Lean production. But a “tent-pole horror film,” as del Toro put it, hadn’t been made in years. High-budget productions such as “Alien” and “The Shining” had been followed by decades of cheaper thrills. “The natural flaw of horror as a genre is that, ninety-nine per cent of the time, it’s a clandestine genre,” he said. “It lives and breathes—‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’ the first ‘Saw,’ ‘The Blair Witch Project’—in dark little corners that come out and haunt you. Rarely is there a beautiful orchid that blooms.” He mentioned Hitchcock’s “The Birds”: “It was a major filmmaker using cutting-edge optical technology and special effects. It was a big-budget movie. It had Edith Head designing costumes, it had all the luxuries. And it was appealing because it had all the polished aspects of a studio film.”

According to Deadline.com, Universal executives felt that “Madness” would need to make at least five hundred million dollars in worldwide grosses in order to turn a profit, considering global marketing costs. It is possible that del Toro will now present the project to another studio.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/03/guillermo-del-toro-madness-has-gone-dark.html#ixzz1G3d845aI

Aw, fuck.

Sometimes it's just better than way.

nice article by Drew McWeeny about the state of the biz as it relates to 'mountains...' being scrapped

http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/motion-captured/posts/is-it-fair-to-blame-universal-for-the-state-of-the-industry-today

Universal badly wanted to be in the Guillermo Del Toro business. It was a priority to them, and when they made "Hellboy 2: The Golden Army," that was in large part a show of faith on the part of the studio. They wanted to make "Frankenstein" with Guillermo. They wanted to give him a home for his particular voice and vision. And when it came down to it, after a few years marked by expensive filmmmaker-driven flops and sure-thing properties that failed and cult fanboy favorites that no one turned out for, they looked at that R-rated $150 million horror film and said, "We can't." Not that they didn't want to, or that they don't believe in Guillermo, or that they want to make crap instead. They looked at the money they've made, the money they've lost, the choices that have led them to this place, and they said, "We can't."

:(

It was a no brainer that this would never be made the second they announced that del Toro wanted to make it. Besides, Carpenter already did the mutating gory monster in Antarctica thing as well as anyone ever will. For a visionary, del Toro is having some trouble getting the vision-thing working for him. "Madness" was never feasible, "Frankenstein" would be a disaster, "The Hobbit" was a poor fit. And yet, "Devil's Backbone" and "Pan's Labyrinth," his best movies, were both original scripts. Stick to your strengths, big guy! You've got great, original ideas. Make a movie out of your great, original ideas!

it's silly, you could totally make Mountains PG-13. The book isn't that violent, aside from mutilation-discoveries that could totally be managed at Star Wars-level gore.

50-ft penguins are the elephant in the room

50-ft penguins are the 50-ft penguins in the room

the cancellation of this project is so tragic and i hope he gets to make this movie one day. there are very few directors i'm as interested in seeing what they come up with as del toro.

it's silly, you could totally make Mountains PG-13. The book isn't that violent, aside from mutilation-discoveries that could totally be managed at Star Wars-level gore.

OTM

dude had a hard R vision

Not dead yet, getting better, etc.

Somewhat of an uh.

GDT entering competition for unluckiest filmmaker in the game

though i'm looking at the imdb for pacific rim and the cast is p awesome

so basically space jockeys = old ones, aliens = shoggoths

(seriously fuck off to anyone who thinks that's a "spoiler")

You heartless cynic etc

Nah it's just kinda obvious that's the route they're gonna take with Prometheus. Lovecraft invented so many sci-fi/horror tropes that are still being used that it's pretty easy to spot the influence.

Xenoarcheology

lame

Enjoyed the first episode of The Strain! (Don't know if it's being discussed elsewhere) Very well put-together nonsense.

That seems to be the general takeaway. Basically, as long as you begin by understanding it is nonsense, the rest comes very easily.

Wow, "The Book of Life" (which he produced) has got to be one of the most gorgeous films I've seen in years. I sort of want to see it again to see it in 3D. Loved it.

Did I say "Book of Life" was gorgeous? Well "Crimson Peak," while both overheated and undercooked, boasts some of the most sumptuous production design I've seen in years. I'd see it again in a heartbeat despite it having nothing much else compelling really going for it beyond some impressively bloody make-up. Because I mean, who really makes a ghost movie where the demonic scary ghosts are supporting players at best? Surprised they didn't just go all the way and reveal it's all been a book she was writing ... or was it?

Man, del Toro, what is up with you? You spend years juggling dream projects, then when you finally do make a movie - this, "Pacific Rim" - it's something that no one really wanted.

What might have been:

https://money.yahoo.com/tom-cruise-versus-cthulhu-inside-104759713.html

I would have watched that! V intriguing

I would have watched that on an airplane

Wouldn't mind seeing more of the concept art, that one image was pretty good.

Whilst in Aberdeen, I am staying in an old 1800’s hotel. i am in the Most Haunted room of it- which was vacated this morning by one of our producers. Odd electrical and physical occurences scared her into leaving asap. Stay tuned- if anything happens I will report.

— Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) August 20, 2024

UPDATE-. I can only say:. Nothingbhas happened yet, but the atmosphere in the room is opressive and I am not gonna spend much more time there. It may be suggestion, but at this point I kept it but am sleeping in another room- I need 6 hours of sleep to have a good shooting day-…

— Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) August 22, 2024

6:28 Scotland. Finished the shooting day. Going into the room now- dinner at 8:00 Anything happens and I will update. the room has more than vibes there is something angry and teritorial there. A shred of rage. Room #4

— Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) August 22, 2024

:D

a master of cinematic technique at work: literally nothing happened but the vibe has been created

No sounds or sights happened- but justan opressive vibe- Room #4 I shall return... Life is unstructured- no grand finale pic.twitter.com/sbwJfyVkS3

— Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) August 23, 2024

it's all fun and games until del toro is frightened to death by an aberdonian apparition

GDT reaping:

Just saw Frankenstein. Still too much polish, cgi and action movie flash but this is a strong contender for his best film. I thought it was really lovely and it brought a few tears to my eye. It really earns its place around the top in a long line of Frankenstein films, it does a lot of things differently. Well done.

I finally saw the Shape of Water a couple of weeks ago. It was good but did not sell the sexualization of the fish dude and how her buddies didn’t seem too thrown by her fucking the cat eating fish dude.

Well, it's a suitable companion to Eggers' Nosferatu--a bloated-budget over-embellishment of a story told well several generations ago. And since GdT can't get funding to make AtMoM on his terms, he is now talking about (threatening?) The Phantom of the Opera.

i very much want to see his Frankenstein

It is beautiful to watch. But like his Nightmare Alley, it boasts high-end production values instead of doing anything innovative. (I probably wouldn't have seen it if AFI hadn't booked a 35mm print.)

In Mary Shelley's book the 'monster' was intelligent, articulate, physically strong and athletic. The movie adaptations all seem to make him big and strong, but clumsy and capable only of groans, grunts and weird animal cries. Which way did del Toro go with it?

the Kenneth Branagh Frankenstein has an intelligent and articulate monster but unfortunately also stars Kenneth Branagh

Intelligent in this one

GdT's Creature is intelligent and articulate because of tutoring by a blind peasant paterfamilias, modeled on The Bride of Frankenstein's blind monk, who can "see" the Creature's appetite for human friendship. Does such a figure appear in Shelley's book?

Also, this version of the Creature appears to have superhuman healing powers and to be potentially immortal, which is why he asks the doctor for a mate. There's no hint of his trying to get jiggy with Elizabeth, which seems strange in comparison to The Shape of Water.

not only Kenneth Branagh, but SEXY bare chest-era Branagh. De Niro is the only decent thing in that film.

xp the kindly blind man is in fact an element of the original story, and a crucial one, IMO.

This movie was frustrating to me, because everywhere that it stuck close to the book, it was close to perfect, and every deviation was a miss. (except for the creature just tossing dudes around like ragdolls, that ruled IMO)

I thought the Branagh film was really nice looking.

I totally did not see Ralph Ineson in this, he's credited as a professor but I don't recall which scene.

I only seen one shot inspired by Bernie Wrightson and I wouldn't have noticed unless I had seen someone doing a comparison on social media (Frankenstein sitting at the window), he's credited on the film so I imagine there's more than that. Definitely has an influence on the look of the creature, but he's way more handsome in this. I'm not familiar with Elordi but he looked lovely.

A friend who's a critic said about the new Frankenstein that del Toro can't resist his weakness for overdetermination.

he is now talking about (threatening?) The Phantom of the Opera.

― Infanta Terrible (j.lu), Sunday, October 26, 2025 11:21 PM (yesterday)

The only threat I can see is more remakes*. Also, he said he's only going to make a couple more live action films because he's chosen animation as his future.

* Apparently it's illegal to make a gothic horror film that isn't based on a story that hasn't been retold several times, even worse is that this is creeping into novel publishing, there's so many retellings now.

Correction: that isn't based on a story that HAS been retold several times. See Luc Besson's Taste The Bloody Baguette of Dracula

i haven't seen this, hate preemptively judging things i haven't seen, definitely am pro-adaptations making bold choices with the source material, yet what i've heard of the changes sounds so deeply unfrankenstein that i probably won't even put myself through the 2.5 hrs

Saw Frankenstein tonight, it was lush and goth as hell... for my money much better modern monster movie experience than Nosferatu

early ILX reviews have this pegged for me as "i'll watch this on an international flight"

I didn't expect this to be better than any of the many good adaptations of this story already made, and it wasn't, and I assume del Toro didn't expect it to be, either, given his love of the material and fealty to the Universal monsters, but it was still really good, and like most of his movies I'm glad I saw it. Dude loves his costumes and production design. Some random thoughts:

1) How funny that the monster in his "Modern Prometheus" should resemble the alien in "Prometheus."
2) Even more than most of his movies this one often had the vibe of Tim Burton but with lots of blood and gore.
3) The final confrontation reminded me of "Blade Runner."
4) Also liked it a lot more than nu-"Nosferatu."
5) I can't believe GdT keeps getting movies made - he's coming off a string of big budget under-performers, Oscar winner aside - but good for him.

I didn't expect this to be better than any of the many good adaptations of this story already made

― Josh in Chicago, Sunday, November 2, 2025 10:08 PM (yesterday)

Aside from this and the James Whale films, I don't think there's many screen adaptations that particularly stand out.

Probably right, those are the biggies; I was also thinking of "Young Frankenstein," too, tbh!

I guess the other ones I was thinking of are more tangential. Couple of the Hammer films, "Spirit of the Beehive," sort of (a massive influence on "Pan's Labyrinth," that's for sure), um, "Edward Scissorhands," maybe? And of course there was just "Poor Things," and ironically the trailer for the Maggie Gyllenhaal one showed before this! As an iconic creation, the Monster of course pops up all over the place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_featuring_Frankenstein%27s_monster

Lovely film. Good performances by Isaac and Elordi. Proper storybook feel overall which I appreciated.

I vaguely remember Frankenstein Unbound which was pretty
fucking wack. Brannaugh’s Frankenstein suuuucked. Never saw the Hammer versions but the monster looked cool.

Never saw Frankenhooker.

early ILX reviews have this pegged for me as "i'll watch this on an international flight"

production design / sets / locations are definitely designed to be seen on a big screen — their differences do more to separate/distinguish the strands of the narrative than the script

(Unfortunately, dunno if it was my theatre, or the encoding of the DCP, or because the whole thing is mastered for Netflix, the blacks are so soft that large areas may as well have been a close-up of a Russian Blue.)

I thought this was pretty good. It felt a bit like a children's or family film in touches, with that sort of whimsical edge to it. But overall I thought it was quite fun, and I liked the neatness of the structure and story within the story. I probably had fairly low expectations after reading this thread so was pleasantly surprised. Agree about the storybook feel, it was quite charming. The themes were delivered with just the right level of sentimentality too, I felt.

The Hammer versions make a good contrast with the Universal ones - Universal's about the monster, Hammer is much more interested in the scientist.

heh

https://bsky.app/profile/ddiamond.bsky.social/post/3m54m7prcgc2j

I thought this was really good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0NGBCzF1JY

I will forgive his praise of Avatar in exchange for his stories about Cameron. Maybe I knew this at one point, but they've been friends for decades. Del Toro lived at his house in the '90s, and Cameron helped him get Cronos made. Fast forward many years, and when del Toro's dad was kidnapped (forgot about this, too), Cameron paid for a top international negotiator to help get him back. How Cameron knew or had access to the guy, who knows.

He also makes a really good point about Baroque filmmakers like Ken Russell, or Baz Luhrmann or Derek Jarmen, that (essentially) once you commit to going over the top you are basically stuck there, there's no way to pivot, which makes it harder to pull off than maybe they get credit for. He says the same of Uncut Gems, basically how hard it is to sustain something that manic, which in turn underscores how risky it is to go that route in the first place. Even if I don't personally like a lot of their results, I get what del Toro means.

Anyway, del Toro is one of my favorite talking-about-movies directors, up there with Scorsese.

Over halfway through my episodic viewing and not feeling it at all. Very bad CGI, ridiculously over the top staging. Having the baron climb a steeple in the middle of a lightning storm in order to install a critical part of his ludicrous contraption at the last possible moment perhaps counts as an example of Alfred's "overdetermination". I've hardly overdosed on Frankenstein - I read the book and saw the Branagh film both a long time ago - but my feeling what is the point of retelling this story?

Same feeling with Peter Jackson and King Kong. Maybe they’re a director’s Hamlet, thinking they can bring a novel interpretation?

I'm trying to recall what I would consider bad CGI in this. I mean, CGI is there, but the only time it really caught my eye was for animal attacks or maybe a couple of CGI matte-style shots, iirc. Maybe it looks worse on TV?

I agree I didn't get much new from this retelling, but I still thought the retelling was pretty good.

The giant batteries or whatever falling over in the castle looked less weighty than smaller real models would have done, and the animals were shocking and utterly unconvincing - the stationary deer lacked any spark of life and the movement of the wolves and sheep was laughable.

i watched on a TV and definitely thought the CGI in the first part of the movie was distractingly bad. lots of badly-matched Star Wars prequel style moments of people pretending to be awed by grand vistas and vast architectural spaces which they are noticeably not occupying or seeing.

i forgot all about it when Elordi shows up, who saves the movie. even considering its embellishments and departures from the book i'd say its still the best version of mary shellys novel we've gotten so far. obviously theres better frankenstein-adjacent movies, but for a movie version of the book frankenstein, this is the best anyones done imo.

This was ok, not great. Oscar Isaac didn't bring enough derangement along with the egotism, imo. I went in not knowing del Toro was inspired by Bernie Wrightson's visual concept of the monster, thought "this is straight Wrightson" during, and was happy to see the acknowledgement in the credits.

I really enjoyed the movie for the most part, but yeah, the CGI/effects stuff was almost enough to turn me off. Victor's castle looked like some crap out of a video game, even though I guess it was partially practical. It looked ridiculous when it exploded too. Felt like I was watching a dang-ass Transformers movie. Sailor-tossing in the opening scene was pretty stinky as well.

Overall though, I had a really great time and was glad I caught it in theaters.

Lousy special effects
Terrible pacing
Bad acting from everyone but Walz and Isaac

It STINKS.

Del Toro hasn't made a great movie since Pan's Labyrinth.

And he probably never will again. (He’s never made a great one in English at all.) But he’s made some good ones, and there’s no harm in talking about what’s good or interesting or entertaining in any of them as they come out.

Glad i’m not the only one underwhelmed by Shape of Water. Is Cronos good?

I've heard good things about the B&W director's cut of Nightmare Alley. Anyone seen it?

Cronos is excellent, probably because it is rooted in Mexico City's cosmopolitan heritage and does innovative things with the vampire mythos. The short Geometria is a very black comedy--I don't know if that could be sustained over a feature-length film, but....

GdT's Nightmare Alley (in B&W or full color) looks splendid but doesn't otherwise improve on the original film.

I do find it frustrating that he is so creative and imaginative, and he keeps getting money to make movies, but then those movies are mid Beauty and the Beast retreads, or Godzilla retreads or Frankenstein retreads, or Nightmare Alley remake, or whatever Gothic horror (the great looking) Crimson Peak was riffing off. (Pan's Labyrinth was a bit of a riff, too, but it didn't feel a retread of an idea passed through the del Toro filter.) He and Hellboy (or Blade, for that matter) felt like good fits, because they offered comic book and blockbuster pleasures with plenty of room for his more creative sensibilities, though I haven't seen those movies for a while. I haven't seem his Pinocchio yet, either. Still, I'll take del Toro over Burton any day.

For sure. Ten-year old Cow-Art would not be able to fathom why I have no interest in the Beetlejuice sequel.

Cronos is a lot of fun.
Mimic is really good.
The Devil's Backbone is probably my favorite Del Toro movie, tied with Hellboy.
Blade 2 is the best Marvel movie.
Hellboy 2 was fairy-tale bullshit. So was Pan's Labyrinth, but good, and scary.
Nightmare Alley was at least an hour too long.
I never finished Crimson Peak; have never seen I Fucked A Fish-Man I Stole From Work; have never seen Pinocchio.

*snorts and lol’s*

Nightmare Alley tries to turn pulp into art and is self-serious and stiff, yawn.

Nightmare Alley amazed me due to how painstakingly faithful to the original film it was, almost an exact scene-for-scene match, and yet manages to be 40 minutes longer. I still don't quite understand how he did that.

crimson peak is good fun

Pan's Labyrinth was a bit of a riff, too, but it didn't feel a retread of an idea passed through the del Toro filter

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, November 13, 2025 2:46 PM (three hours ago)

I seen some people saying it was a ripoff of The White People or Spirit Of The Beehive, that's nonsense but they're definitely influences on it.

Despite my problems with the special effects, I think Frankenstein is maybe his best.

A lot of my favorite films of the past 15 years or so have an absolutely baffling use of cgi. I get how the wolves and burning mansion scenes could be regarded as too important to work around but cgi mice and deer? The very next day I seen All That Heaven Allows and there's a guy feeding a real deer.

It's not a rip off of Spirit of the Beehive, but there is a lot of Spirit of the Beehive in it. And Frankenstein!

Just watched it tonight. The cgi didn't bother me too much, but I agree that there was a generic goth-fantasy vibe to the art direction. It did not have a distinct look (something Nosferatu achieved better imo). But overall, I was pretty engaged by it. Especially Elordi, like everyone says. Oscar Isaac is fine but he's so punchable in the role that it's partly just a relief to spend time with another character. I didn't mind Del Toro turning the creature into something of a superhero, it seems like a natural connection for him.

I liked this a lot!

i think the yardstick is if you liked Crimson Peak you’ll at least find this more tolerable than most ppl imo.

it’s very Bad Dads Gothic/telenovella and i enjoyed the ott-ness of that in particular, the shirtlessness & the storms & the reds, all great.

unfortunately i think Isaac maybe has too much natural warmth/charisma to portray Victor with the coldness required - he’s a little miscast. which sucks bc i do really love Oscar Isaac in everything always. also the accent was a little :/ but i think the character is forced to indicate a lot very quickly so you don’t get much sense of him except what yr told.

Elordi was great as the monster, the movement work was excellent, just a terrific performance that felt like a good marriage of actor + makeup effects where you get the combined effect of both without one overshadowing the other.

i think though Elordi’s success as the monster in the story is also bc it’s a character that is SO emotional (vs Victor), delToro’s inherent sympathies gives the monster more to do & more depth. I mean the monster has that benefit in the book to some degree too so that is kinda baked-in but still, i definitely felt even more of an imbalance there.

i didnt like the Waltz stuff at all, it felt like he was just added to explain where the money & the bodies came from - all of his stuff & most of the actiony ship stuff I could have done away with completely in favor of giving Victor & even Mia Goth more development idk

but i found it really beautiful and mostly pretty enjoyable as a monster movie/gothic lit/guillermo nerd

also quite funny in places! the confession scene w Mia Goth was v funny

shoutout to costume designer Kate Hawley. Stunning! (same costumer for Crimson Peak so, goated obv) every single Mia Goth costume she looked like an ornate Victorian insect, just incredible stuff

I didn't enjoy Crimson Peak at all. And the things about this that annoyed me were similar to the reasons I disliked CP. That said, this is a better film

I prefer the grittier, subtler Del Toro of the Pan's Labyrinth / Devil's Backbone years, and i always forget that he's moved on to a kind of heightened camp, luxuriating in gothic signifiers, elaborate costumes and scenery, fantastical setpieces, and a near Burton-esque level of campiness.

I wasn't really sure what I was.menat to take away from this -Shelley's philosophical and moral musings were all but dispensed with, and yet every line was delivered as though it were imbued with meaning.

For me, Victor Frankenstein is a solitary obsessive driven to madness and eventually revulsion by the significance of his work.

Del Toro's Victor is pretty much just a conniving and cowardly asshole whose morals and motivations seem to switch on a dime, with little reason. One minute he's practically nuzzling the Creature, fascinated by it; next he's chaining him up and violently thrashing him, disappointed that he can't say more than the word "Victor".

My favourite parts were actually the parts on the ice and the middle section with the blind man.

Well, obviously Victor takes after his dad in a lot of ways.

So is that all it's really saying? Like father like son?

It was told as a fairytale imo so not sure we're gonna get some deep psychological revelations about fathers and sons, but I thought within that form it was quite neat and symmetrical in a way I enjoyed.

The two brothers provide an alternative model to lfls from the start. del Toro is unsubtle enough already, you don’t need to reduce him further to divine an actively stupid intent!

I'm not absolutely sure what you mean there. Personally, I don't feel satisfied by his sudden switch into sadism. Like you say, if it's just a matter of a fairytale-simple "wicked stepfather" narrative then fair enough.

But "He suddenly decided to treat his creation cruelly because he is an asshole and his dad was an asshole" is a far cry from the themes within Frankenstein. From what I remember of the book, Victor's upbringing is far from cruel, and his parents are very nurturing.

And even if that's not the point of this film, it's not a very interesting idea in itself. I was almost expecting, when it turned out he was being bankrolled by a Crimean arms dealer, to hint at an allegory about AI and our relationship with it.

But much as every line of dialogue seemed to be delivered with profound meaning - Elizabeth's challenges and The Creature's own musings while in the rural sanctuary - they didn't really amount to anything more than "No it's YOU who is the monster".

Then at the end, after everything they've been through and so many snapped necks and drowned sailors, Victor and the Creature just seem to forgive each other - not because they have each reached a point of enlightenment, but because they seem knackered.

I left thinking "Well what was I meant to take away from this after two and a half hours?" Is it just a romp? Am i asking too much of this film to have a coherent theme or moral centre? Or is Del Toro just stuck telling more-or-less the same story over and over again?

Victor and the Creature just seem to forgive each other - not because they have each reached a point of enlightenment, but because they seem knackered.

I think I mentioned it after I saw it, but this reminded me of the end of "Blade Runner," where creation/erstwhile antagonist surprisingly flips the script through the particularly human attribute of empathy. Not particularly deep, there or here, but it's imo effective. In "Blade Runner," of course, the angry and frustrated Batty's empathetic resolution is ultimately driven by a realization of his mortality. The similarly angry and frustrated Monster in this movie is faced with a different dilemma, immortality, but quickly comes to the same conclusion. I would have liked to see this movie show the Monster's evolution toward this conclusion a little better; he seemed a sensitive sweetheart from the start.

That's OTM

I don't think it is a sudden switch to sadism, the film implies the passing of time and a festering disappointment. Time in the film is generally moving at a decent canter in the way it often does in story within a story.

I don't think this film is particularly complex but if you think what's being said is "he is an asshole because his dad is an asshole" then I think you're missing some fairly unsubtle and constant theme building throughout. He hates his creation because he doesn't believe it's alive, since it can't communicate, and this means he thinks he's failed, and it represents his failure. Then in the end he realises that the real free will or genuine independent life is the rebellious rampaging depressive we made along the way.

They both cease to judge each other as they come to a shared understanding that their ability to be different gives them something to love in the other. Their reconciliation is if anything too perfect and plotted, so it's wrong to say it happens for no reason. It's quite a sentimental father son journey!

It's obv fairly cheesey I guess and kinda hammered home but I still sort of liked it as a fairytale. This is why I disagree it's a story about them being the same, it's about them being different, and each realising this means the other has in some way succeeded. Albeit with the help of a magic blind man in a hut in the woods.

Feels a bit daft but it really went big on this with such a huge do you see type ending that I think it can't be critiqued as empty, just for plenty of other reasons.

Fair enough.

For me that's a dissatisfying and unnecessary deviation from the story of Frankenstein. While it works (if flimsily - ffs you gave it LIFE, is that not enough?) as a plot explanation, and to some extents a quirky fairytale movie, to me it's doing Shelley's book and the fundamental ideas behind it a disservice.

Victor and the Creature just seem to forgive each other

Heavily prefigured on the Creature's part by the old blind man telling him the importance of forgiveness. I agree that none of this is very subtle. The real lesson or moral arrives with the ship captain telling his men they're going home and giving up pursuit of the Pole — because that way lies madness!

xpost i mean idk, fairly sure if i googled 'themes frankenstein book' some of the same things this film gets at would be there. doesn't mean you have to enjoy it.

the entire thing is that he doesn't think he has given it life, he thinks it is not alive. then he realises, thanks to the slightly forced blind man sidequest which lets the creature learn to speak, that he was wrong. and the creature's ability to forgive him concludes that realisation.

also lol i forget that the ship captain too learned a lesson. i know it's sort of dumb but i found it mildly refreshing for a film to go so freely into sentimentality. idk, it felt quite brave.

Also, obv. the movie is very Catholic, not just in the usual Jesus/back to life way, but in those deep-seated philosophies of forgiveness/confession (which of course Victor at one point very literally corrupts to his own sacrilegious purposes). Just as the monster learns to forgive, so too does Victor finally acknowledge his own guilt/failings, at least to an extent. Again, yeah, not subtle, but the whole sequence on the boat is a damned man recognizing his fate/status and finally confessing his sins, in parallel to the monster's own ethical (if also pretty superficial) journey. So in this way we get man (Victor) playing God, and God (monster) becoming man (which is also very Jesus-y).

iirc gdt said that this version was intended to be mexican af so i think the catholic sentimentality has gotta be part of that

https://deadline.com/2025/10/oscar-isaac-guillermo-del-toro-frankenstein-mexican-catholic-1236572220

okay this is oscar isaac quote but yeah:

Isaac added, “And it’s this very European story, but told through a very Latin-American, Mexican, Catholic point-of-view. So, it was just high passion all the time.”

Biggest surprise for me in hearing Del Toro talk about this film is that he said there was no intention of sexual attraction between Goth and Elordi's characters, when I was watching the film I was expecting that that kind of relationship was going to develop.

is Oscar Isaac nude in this

oh yes

Xps this happened a lot in this film, I felt. It kept breadcrumbing ideas and glimmers of plotlines but never really followed through with them.

Elizabeth's character was set-up to present a counterbalance to Victor's masculine hubris.

But this all came undone very quickly for me; first when she was moved into the role of a secret love interest, then when all her protestations and challenges appeared to boil down to her fancying the Creature.

Both those narrative threads were frayed at the ends, and got largely abandoned almost as soon as they were taken up. And that's a shame because they could have done so much more to flesh-out Elizabeth as one of the only female characters in the film. She becomes largely unimportant to the plot, despite being set up as a major character near the start.

Instead poor Mia Goth ends up being a clotheshorse to hang fancy costumes on.

I thought the monster would try to revive and marry her, but instead we got an odd frenemies trip to the North Pole for some reason

Not sure how him pursuing her made her more like him.