It’s finally happening. Guillermo del Toro‘s long gestating passion project, the R-rated, high-budget adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft‘s At The Mountains of Mandess is now being put into motion, Deadline reports.

James Cameron will produce the film, to be shot in 3D and Del Toro will direct for Universal. Pre-production begins in a few weeks for a summer shoot. Check out a synopsis of the novel below.

In the Lovecraft tale, a gruesome discovery made during a scientific expedition to the South Pole in the 1930s hints at the true origin of mankind having come from elder gods from another planet. Bad things happen when those life forms are awakened.

Comingsoon also spoke with the director recently, who explained the project:

“What ‘Mountains of Madness’ is is a throwback to something nobody does anymore, it’s tentpole horror,” he told us. “Everybody now understands horror as minimum investment, maximum return, and most of the time, they go at it, as production entities, with great cynicism, like ‘Let’s make it really gory or extreme’ and for a very low budget, and recuperate our investment, make money, all that. If you make a horror movie for half a million and it makes 4, they’re very happy. The studio sees horror movies as something they will not invest more than $30-40 million. ‘Mountains of Madness’ needs to be tentpole in the way that the tentpole movies of the past were, about $130 million.”

“I remember when I saw ‘Alien’ and I was absolutely blown away by it,” he continued. “I saw John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing,’ I saw Kubrick’s ‘The Shining.’ These were massive movies in a genre that normally doesn’t get massive movies. (With) ‘Mountains of Madness,’ there are two things that I’ve been battling all these years.

You can check out the rest of their convo here and look forward to production starting next summer for Mountains of Madness.

Are you excited for this to be Guillermo Del Toro’s next project?

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