Guillermo del Toro drops CGI test for his unproduced At the Mountains of Madness film on IG.
It's pretty cool but I've always insisted Lovecraft works best when you don't (or physically can't) get a good look at the monster.
This is why Event Horizon is still the best lovecraft film.
For real. How do you visually depict things that are indescribable/unknowable? Wtf is "Non-Euclidian Geometry"? It's supposed to break your brain, so anything that can be processed visually means you can, on some level, understand it.
You use patterns and shapes that are visually upsetting and disorienting
You make use of really unsettling sounds and music
You use a wide variety of available optical illusions to make the audience perceive things that aren't there.
You use visual effects to depict spaces that cannot exist
[The "Freaky Circle" scene in Thor Ragnarok is a simple example of non-euclidean geometry in film]
Here's an article about depictions of non-euclidean geometry in horror movies
Interesting tidbit - Some very old, like early 90s game engines, had a quirk where you could layer areas on top of each other. This allowed you to do some freaky things like have 720 degree circles, or rooms that, by all rights, should have occupied the same space. Made for some really mind bending mazes. Here's an example from Duke Nukem 3d
Here's some non-euclidean spaces in made in Portal 2
And, of course, you show how the gribbly weirdness effects the characters without directly showing the gribbly weirdness. Hitchcock's famous "Nothing is scarier" principle.
At the Mountains of Madness also has an escalating scale of weirdness. The initial fossils that trigger the expedition are weird, but so are all pre-cambrian fossils. Then the elder things are weird, but they're recognizably animals and turn out to be sentient and intelligent. They're people, just really weirdly shaped people. Then the shoggoth is weird. It doesn't have any fixed shape and is totally unlike any living thing on earth. But it's still, in some sense, a living, physical creature. Just a really fucking scary biologically engineered super predator/nanotech toolbox. And then one character sees the "unnamed evil" at the very end. The reader doesn't get any description of it except that seeing it completely breaks one character's brain.
Non euclidean geometry is any geometry that doesn't obey Euclid's axioms. Space itself is non-Euclidean (as far as the Moon cares it's moving in a straight line, but Earth is somehow always off to the side). The distance between A and B is always growing, and it's possible that if you go far enough in a straight line you'll end up back where you started. Spheres are Euclidean but any shape on their surface plane is not.
People mostly use non-Euclidean geometry as a shorthand for weird video game maps
Exactly (though every time someone asks me to represent Non-Euclidian geometry I show them a Sphere.)
This was why I loved the Brain of Mensis in Bloodborne at first- because it's essentially a shoggoth that you just catch glimpses of, and actively looking at it will kill you.
Then you get to just stare at it up close, which kinda sucks tbh
I literally cannot stand looking at it when I kill it. I think I have the thing about a bunch of circles a little bit tho. Both rom and brain are freaky to me.
Looking at it was somehow more horrifying that not looking at it. At first I presumed it was some... light. A wisp. But seeing it flaccid and immobile, yes in a room so dark I couldn't see my own feet, I was disgusted.
Looking at the summary of the book, the shoggoth is fine to look at but the "unnamed evil" makes them insane
i got in to making a list of the various Lovecraft inspired and/or cosmic horror movies I could think of.
Event Horizon, Alien, The Thing.
Annihilation draws on a lot of Lovecraft, or just Cosmic Horror, themes.
Hellraiser fits; Bizarre aliens from an alternate dimension come unexpectedly to drag unsuspecting people in to their reality. Their motives are strange bordering on incomprehensible (unless you're really kinky). Clive Barker's Undying (the video game) is very much an homage to Lovecraft and contemporary weird fiction authors.
The new game Scorn owes a lot to Lovecraft's writing as well as the visual style of Geiger and the Alien movie.
The Mist by Stephen King definitely hits some Cosmic Horror vibes. One day for no obvious reason a thick mist overtakes, as far as anyone can tell, the whole world. Then the creatures appear. The end of the movie is notably one of the bleakest conclusions to a piece of fiction I've ever seen.
The Descent has strong Lovecraft vibes. A group of women rock climbers descend in to the hostile and alien environment of a deep unexplored cave. Trauma inspired psychological horror and hilarious hijinks ensure.
While looking this up I found that the panned "Underwater" movie with Kristen Stewart from a few years ago features, no shit, Cthulhu as the big bad guy.
A Quiet Place is a kind of a Lovecraft Light story in so far as the hostile creatures just kind of come out of nowhere and apparently easily destroy humanity.
Same with The Bird Book. Inexplicable creatures or phenomena appear from nowhere and cause deadly insanity in anyone who sees them.
Pacific Rim is a wild mash-up of Cosmic Horror, Real Robots, and Kaiju films full of references and nods to all three genres that you'll pick up on if you're a fan. Features 20 story tall robots and kaiju beating the living hell out of each other. One of my favs.
The Cabin In The Woods is a like a meta-cosmic horror story. I guess talking about it too much gives away the plot but it starts out as a really by the numbers cabin horror story and then gets weirder and more inventive as it goes on.
Tremors, for all that it's a fairly light hearted and goofy horror comedy, draws on some Lovecraft tropes with it's monsters being bizarre survivors of the pre-Cambrian age.
Hellboy, both comics and movies, show a deep love for the wierd fiction, pulp fiction, and cosmic horror genres.
John Dies at the End is a wacky horror-comedy entry in to the Cosmic Horror spehre.
Sphere is also a cosmic horror film, though the real villain is the shlocky self-righteous and entirely serious 90s psychobabble from the main character.
True Detective from back in 2014 was kind of famous for having some Lovecraft Light/Cosmic Horror themes.
Who Goes There? Is the 1938 novella that directly inspired The Thing
I love how it never stops changing. You just keep seeing more and more appendages never knowing which one is gonna be the one to get him, and then BOOM tentacles.
del Toro might be the only living director who could do a half decent translation of Lovecraft's vibes, even if it will never be as scary as our imaginations.
The anthology show on Netflix he helmed with various directors has several Lovecraft stories adapted that he oversaw and he did a pretty damn good job
Yeah I saw Pickman's Model the other night and it was pretty good, although I think I prefer Velvet Buzzsaw's portrayal of basically the same story despite it having a very different vibe.
I felt that one was the weakest of the bunch so far, my favorite non-lovecraft episode of the series has to be 'The Autopsy'.
TBH it's the only episode out of the series I've seen, was part of a lovecraft-esque movie night; might check out the rest might not.
I highly recommend 'The Viewing' alongside 'The Autopsy', first is by the same creatives as Mandy (Panos Cosmatos) and is a weird 70s inspired mindscape while the second is a very interestingly adapted short story with a cool conclusion.
finally, a monster that is phallic and yonic at the same time
It looks like it would be a shogoth, but from that scene it would be an elder thing. Hard to say. The elder things are written to be sympathetic bur completely alien. Which fits in with Del Toro's style. So I am not sure what departures he is making from the source material
I'd say it doesn't really look like either and is either a new creator, a placeholder for the animation test, or they've significantly deviated from the way the Shoggoths and Elder Things are usually depicted.
It turns out there's a Youtube link - Guillermo del Toro has released a CGI test of his unproduced ‘AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS’ film - YouTube.
As a horror this looks cool
As a cosmic horror this looks ass
The Elder Things and the Shoggoths aren't the "Cosmic" part of the Cosmic Horror in At the Mountains of Madness. Plus it's very likely that this is a placeholder model for the CGI test.
For the best that it didn't get made. The script that got put out was utter shit. I was also supremely disappointed in how DITWH and Pickmans Model got handled by his new netflix show (even though he had probably nothing to do with making them and just slapped his name on them).
Guess I'll just come out and say it - I have no interest in Del Toro.
Idk I've never seen any of his work and don't care to.
My brain just can't get excited about anything he's done :vivian-shrug:
Pickman's Model is in my top 3 HPL stories, is the adaption not worth watching?
It's changed a good bit but absolutely the better of the 2. DITWH is stripped of all cosmic elements and is just a spooky haunted house story. The PM episode, for better or worse, is still deserving of the PM title, IMO. Dreams should have just been called something else.
The Empty Man (2020)
I really loved the scenes in Bhutan. But once the characters returned to the US - I thought things started to get worse and worse.
unsettling
That's the word for it. I do not want crap like jump scares. I want to be unsettled but unsettling horror is rare nowadays.
What is that supposed to be? A shoggoth? It doesn't look like an elder thing.
