This could have been something truly incredible.
Horror movies, generally, are cheap.
Saving a fortune on lighting alone, they usually consist of actors you've never heard of before, maybe one of them has a mask and a knife, and they're maybe hanging out somewhere spooky.
None of it really requires much money to pull off. In terms of pure horror movies, it is tough to think of one that might have required much of an actual budget.
World War Z was as much an action movie as it was a horror movie, so that doesn't really count. So maybe... this year's Nope? It cost $68 million to produce before any promotion, so that could well be the most expensive horror film ever made.
Of course, if Oscar-winning director Guillermo Del Toro (The Shape of Water, Nightmare Alley) had his way, that wouldn't be the case, as he planned on making a $100 million adaptation of the classic horror novel
At The Mountains of Madness.
Around 2012, in between Hellboy II and Pacific Rim, this was next on GDT's to-do list, based on H.P. Lovecraft's still-scary 1936 story about an expedition to Antarctica in which a group of explorers discover a new life-form.
This week, the director posted the first-time-seen scene from the movie, in which someone crosses paths with that life-form...
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CkwxWwstuW6/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Del Toro had planned on Tom Cruise to be the leading man in his version of the story, which also would've been produced by none other than James Cameron.
His price tag turned off both Warner Bros. and Universal at the time, especially when Del Toro planned on keeping it adult-aimed with the violence and horror.
Also, the movie's plot similarities to 2012's Prometheus essentially put the whole thing on ice.
However, Del Toro now has a very active relationship with Netflix - a few weeks ago he released his Cabinet of Curiosities, while December will see his version of Pinocchio hit the streaming service - and there is a chance that this could be the new home for his (now smaller) horror.
He told
Collider the following about the potential for adaptation on Netflix:
"Take a wild guess which were the first projects I presented, you know? I went through the cupboard and found 'Monte Cristo' and 'Mountains of Madness.' Those were a couple of the ones I presented first."
Fingers crossed!
