FUUCK!!! Del Toro loses Mountains of Madness!

Hmmm... I can understand Del Toro not wanting to compromise his ability to make the movie as he envisions it, but does he not expect to have to make concessions when being handed $150 million? That's fairly naive.

Reminds me of the creator of Carnivale whose stubborness regarding production costs led to the show getting cancelled. (Still bitter about that one.)

PG-13? Lovecraft? I'm in the 'Wouldn't bother to sit in a theater' group. As an adult, it drives me nuts when Hollywood down-panders to get more 16-year-olds in the seats. It may reflect basic bean-counting that they do it. But it seldom makes for great 'art', and it doesn't mean that I have to play along.

I grew up on a variety of great and often _expensive_ genre films that couldn't function as PG13 -- the 80's was packed with them! And then watched the studios lose their guts and start turning out PG13 jokes, with clear 'cut-away-to-avoid-R' moments. Terminator Salvation? How about Cloverfield's, "just let me step behind this screen to expload into bits", moment? WTF?

It's gotten to the point where they roll right up to an 'R'-moment, and then fail the gut-check and obviously back peddle. Yea, the above are old examples. I love genre films, but with the baloney above and Real Life, I'm not seeing alot of movies in theaters these days, and certainly not a lot of blockbusters.

Speaking of Cameron: Can you imagine Aliens or Terminator 2 as PG13? They'd lose most of their punch. And neither was cheap and easy to make.
A PG13 Alien? How about Saving Private Ryan, without guts on the ground and an R?

And Del Toro has some seriously messed-up imagery in the pipe for Mountains. For folks that haven't seen the piece, last month's New Yorker article was a pretty cool exploration of what he's up to, if not a quick read ;P

Show The Monster: Guillermo del Toro’s quest to get amazing creatures onscreen

Most of the truly great horror (and other genre) pictures are not R-rated. Some could pass for G, easily. In fact, even some early Rs would be PG or PG-13s now.

Lovecraft- and I mean the books, not Reanimator or From Beyond- DOES NOT lend itself to balls out, R-horror.

I don't know if things changed or if the Canadian system is/was different or what, but back when I saw T2 it had an AA rating or something, for 14+ (still sneaked in at 13, telling the 16 year old teller that I was indeed 14 in a squeaky voice).

Michael Barnes wrote:

Most of the truly great horror (and other genre) pictures are not R-rated. Some could pass for G, easily. In fact, even some early Rs would be PG or PG-13s now.

Lovecraft- and I mean the books, not Reanimator or From Beyond- DOES NOT lend itself to balls out, R-horror.

So true. Stephen King talked at length about this in his excellent non-fiction book Danse Macabre. The best horror is purely psychological... once you start showing details, it can lose some impact even though there may be some secondary impact due to a gross-out factor. Lovecraft, at his best, left things implied or incoherent or even unsaid.

I'm not broken-hearted about the news about this movie. Del Toro is very good, but if he needed a big budget for this, I have some doubts about his interpretation of the story. And while I did enjoy his Hellboy movies, the second one felt like a serious detour away from the tone and style of the comic. I am sorry that we won't get to see Tom Cruise "acting" crazy.

I don't think I could name a truly great horror movie that is not R-rated. Mind you, I don't talk about _thrillers_ but _horror_ movies. I think every horror worth its salt contains some extremely gross elements which automatically earns it the R rating. But correct me if I'm wrong.

BTW, I'm not entirely sure that Lovecraft and movies mix well. Lovecraft's horrors are supposed to be undescribable, but anything you actually see on a movie screen will obviously feel describable for most people. And if the director goes with the "don't show anything" approach, then many fans will be disappointed, because they wanted to see Cthulhu or the Shoggoths or whatever. (Imagine how well the Call Of Cthulhu LCG would sell without pictures...)

And as excited I was about Del Toro directing ATMOM, because I love his horror(ish) movies, he's still relying in them on showing the horrors. Pan's Labyrinth is fucking scary, especially the scene with the eyeless monster, but it wouldn't work without us seeing the monster, and it was definitely describable.

Maybe a couple of years ago I would have said that the perfect director for a Lovecraft movie was Shyamalan (The Village, despite the lackluster ending, was fucking scary, and the monsters were the closest to undescribable I've ever seen, also, the ending of the otherwise generally mediocre Lady In The Water felt somewhat similar as the ending of ATMOM should feel), but unfortunately since then he's seemingly lost every talent he ever had (Happening, anyone?), and also proved that he cannot handle "big" movies (The Last Airbender).

No no no...there are TONS of great non-R horror movies. In fact, I would say that there's more truly great horror that _isn't_ R than is. Nothing before 1968 is R, for example, and if you're looking for truly great horror, there's TONS of it before there even was an R rating. All Universal Horror, the first two generations of Hammer, all the Val Lewton pictures, The Haunting, Rosemary's Baby, The Innocents, the Roger Corman Poe pictures, Mario Bava's best films (including Black Sunday), Psycho and the Birds...

Horror is much more powerful in suggestion than depiction, and as such an R isn't necessarily conducive to great horror. It's conducive to more exploitationish horror and gore, but not necessarily the kind of horror that would best suit Lovecraft.

Lovecraft isn't good for cinema because none of his writing lends itself to adaptation. All the journal entries, first-person accounts, stories with little or no dynamic movement, static narratives, internal dread, and so forth don't make for good movies. ATMoM is the closest he's got to an adventure story, but the structure and plot is not cinematic at all.

This is why films go in other directions and only loosely adapt the source material, like the Stuart Gordon stuff or Brian Yuzna's Necronomicon omnibus (which is actually pretty good). None of his works are good for features, but many would be better as shorts. I used to think that one day I'd write a direct a short based on "The Temple", which would be pretty much a one-man show set in a submarine.

One of the best Lovecraft pictures to me is Corman's The Haunted Palace. It was billed as a Poe adaptation to capitalize on the previous AIP films, but it's totally based on a couple of Lovecraft stories and Vincent Price plays Joseph Curwen in it. It's got all the New England, provincial witchcraft business, dark family secrets and degeneracy, unseen monsters, so on and so forth.

I agree about Shamalamdingdong Wice, as far as making an understated more psychological horror movie goes. Say what you will about his work but Signs and Unbreakable were both genius in these terms. Signs was a story of an alien invasion but it didn't look anything like Independance Day or that new one about LA. It was one family's experience and most of it took place in their basement. Unbreakable was a superhero origin movie and again, was far more subdued than Spiderman or anything of its ilk. Hardly any FX at all in that one, but it still an origin story very well complete with a horribly acted supervillain. Now I'm not saying either of these were great movies, but I thought they were pretty amazing in their simplicity.

Well, I think both Signs and Unbreakable were in fact pretty close to great movies...it's really too bad he believed his own hype and pretty much threw his career away.

Signs is brilliant because it shows almost nothing, yet it's not some kind of ambiguous thing. It's definitely aliens. But instead of it being this big FX film about aliens fucking shit up, it's a quiet picture about family and faith. Unbreakable, I literally had no idea it was a comic book film until I saw it so I had that gradual "holy shit, this is an origin story" feeling while watching it.

He really, really, really wants to do this sort of Playhouse 90/Rod Serling thing...which isn't compatible with Hollywood genre pictures. When he changes scope, he loses focus. Then he spiralled off into the whole SOmething to Say About America cliche with The Village (a Scooby Doo story more than a Twilight Zone one) and Lady in the Water...oh dear jesus...the thought of Paul Giamatti curling up for a bedtime story...

You know, The Mist actually had a good Lovecraft vibe...I think Darabont could definitely pull off a Lovecraft picture...so long as he gets away from his Spielbergian "plain folks" ensemble trope.

Michael Barnes wrote:

Most of the truly great horror (and other genre) pictures are not R-rated. Some could pass for G, easily. In fact, even some early Rs would be PG or PG-13s now.

Lovecraft- and I mean the books, not Reanimator or From Beyond- DOES NOT lend itself to balls out, R-horror.

Given, it's not "exploding heads" horror. Esp. on the written page, where your imagination is providing most of the 'visual'. But we're talking about trying to depict the, "completely lost it, shitting his pants and gibbering" level of foreignness and absolute horror that is implicit to a lot of Lovecraft. How do you depict something so massively alien, that it drives someone mad on sight? With just rubber puppets or CG?

I'm just not sure you can do that without moving pretty solidly into adult content into R territory. Especially, when we've seen movies receive an R for relatively small crossings over the line (THERE WILL BE BLOOD's largely bloodless bowling pin beating got it an R).

Point is, movies have to sincerely undershoot to avoid an R. As Del Toro commented, he didn't necessarily expect to get an R, but he wouldn't commit to delivering nothing above a PG-13.

Hey don't get me wrong, I don't want violence for violence's sake. One of my favorite 'horror' films is Robert Wise's 1963 'The Haunting'. There is literally _nothing_ depicted. Just sound effects and warped lenses. But that's working in a well-known well-worn haunted house genre. It doesn't take many clues to inform the viewer exactly what is the source of the noises, and the viewer fills in the gaps on their own. With Lovecraft, you're crossing outside of much of standard movie fiction, into an area where you really need to explain what's going on, for the viewer to 'get' it, and understand 'why' it's frightening.

And my beef with current 'PG13' deliveries is with the pot holes in plot and depicted material, when they arbitrarily and clumsily screech the visual narrative to a halt, and stick up a big 'MPAA SAYS NO-NO!' sticker on the scene. Do that smoothly and non-ham-handedly and I've got no issues. But do it solely to sell more tickets to kids that drive glittery vampire movie productions, and I do have an issue.

Frankly, I think we could use a mid-teen (15?) rating like they use in some parts of Europe. With the Webernets, most 13 year olds today routinely see material online that would have 'shocked' a 21 year old, twenty or 30 years ago.

Yeah, that was my point exactly about Signs. Now that I think about it The Village had some pretty subdued psychological horror bits as well. You only saw split second views of the monsters that were creepy as shit, and the refferences to the 'bad color' and the towns were pretty eerie as well. The more I think about it the more I think he could pull it off, possibly redeeming himself in the process.

The Mist was amazing. It would have had to be butchered to get a PG-13 rating though, starting with that final scene. I got a 2 disc collectors edition as a gift a while back that has the entire picture in black and white on one disc and it's just sick. Honestly, I think Darbont could pull off just about anything.

tin0men wrote:

Michael Barnes wrote:

Most of the truly great horror (and other genre) pictures are not R-rated. Some could pass for G, easily. In fact, even some early Rs would be PG or PG-13s now.

Lovecraft- and I mean the books, not Reanimator or From Beyond- DOES NOT lend itself to balls out, R-horror.

Given, it's not "exploding heads" horror. Esp. on the written page, where your imagination is providing most of the 'visual'. But we're talking about trying to depict the, "completely lost it, shitting his pants and gibbering" level of foreignness and absolute horror that is implicit to a lot of Lovecraft. How do you depict something so massively alien, that it drives someone mad on sight? With just rubber puppets or CG?
[/i]).


You don't, that's the point. Indescribable alien horror should stay just that; indescibable. The elder things would be pretty easy (for an FX house) to do using the methods you described, but the shoggoth could remain off screen. You show it in the hyroglyhs, but leave the actual monster off screen. I think that would be much scarier than some poorly done shoggoth, or one that didn't match up to the pictures in our minds eyes.

My two favorite horror movies are The Changeling (George C. Scott) and the Haunting -- both of those are quite scary and neither really has the need for an R rating.

Just because it is R Rated doesn't mean it has to have excessive gore. Intensity can get you an R rating, as can the subject matter. It's very fickle.
The Dark Knight is a prime example - I bet if it was NOT based on a childrens comic book character it would have copped an R rating. I found it more violent than Matrix 2, yet the later got an R rating (for head kicks I believe).

I can't think of any comparable film to what I would expect that is PG13 (hammer horror is the example? Really?) I wouldn't want it any more family friendly than Pan's Labyrinth, and that was an R.

I don't like horror films generally and am not a Gore hound. Most modern gore-porn 'horror' I find offensive.But I too am tired of PG13 where the story demands more. Every film these days is filled with cutaways and bloodless swords and rom-com sex scenes. When HBO is more realistic than most movies something is wrong with the industry.

tin0men wrote:

Frankly, I think we could use a mid-teen (15?) rating like they use in some parts of Europe. With the Webernets, most 13 year olds today routinely see material online that would have 'shocked' a 21 year old, twenty or 30 years ago.

Well that does make it tougher for film makers for the US (BIIIG) audience then - in the UK there is 12A (under 12s have to be with an adult), 15 (15+ only) and 18 (18+ only) which makes it more flexible ... so I am still amazed that the The Dark Knight got that 12A rating.