"At the Mountains of Madness" (screenplay)

 

by Gullermo del Tor and Matthew Robbins

unpublished and unproduced

Tasmania, 1939.  A derelict whaler named Arkham floats into a harbor and is boarded by mystified sea patrol and fishermen.  They find the ship in bad shape, evidence of it having been commissioned for an Antarctic expedition by Miskatonic U nine years earlier, some bizarrely mutilated dogs and men, and a madman barricaded in a cabin.  When he kills a sailor with an axe, he gets shot.

Meanwhile, the British are getting set for another Antarctic expedition, headed by Alan Starkweather, backbone of the Empire and all that.  He's informed that the Arkham has turned up.  With one survivor - the madman.  Starkweather is able to talk to him a bit, and he freaks when he hears they're heading for Antarctica.  He also has a hallucination in which his head blows open and becomes a mass of waving tentacles.  He tells them they must kill him if he "begins to change".  And reveals that he is Dr. William Dyer of Miskatonic U.

Thus begins a flashback in which Dyer recalls being handpicked for the 1930 Arctic expedition, leaving Massachusetts with much fanfare, and leaving behind his wife, who is preggers.  

Dyer is about to make a last minute bow-out when Lake, head of the expedition, shows him something - a recently found fossil of an impossible creature found in the Antarctic.  Dyer is on board!

The expedition sails on, and with exposition and character development.  In what may be a mirage, they seem to see signs of a vast city in the fog-enshrouded mountains of the arctic regions.  Lake learns that Dyer's lover has died in childbirth, along with their child, but he keeps the news under wraps.  Another expedition member, Atwood, becomes more and more openly devout, leading prayer meetings.  Dyers becomes best buddies with a fellow named Danforth.  And a big grumpy dude named Larsen takes care of the sled dogs.

The two ships pass into cloud banks and everyone is knocked out. Dyer dreams the fossil is coming to life and sending out signals.  Apparently some time is lost (even the crew is confused by this, but several days at least have gone by when they come to), and the ship runs aground at the titular mountains.  Everyone stands around in awe at these cyclopean peaks, and structures clearly not built by human hands.  Magnetic fields prevent contact with the second ship, time seems to be moving faster than normal, and other weird phenomena take place, including an encounter with man-sized albino penguins, and the finding of weird stone obelisks under the water.  These turn out to be coffins containing the same kind of weird-ass monster as the fossil.  

As they dissect some of the thingies, Larsen and crewman Gunnarson attempt to hunt giant penguins and are attacked by a shoggoth, which has disguised itself as a wounded dog, ala John Carpenter's version of The Thing. It seems the shoggoths attack by fusing victims into their mutable bods.  

On the ship, expedition member Danforth digs out a copy of the Necronomicon he just happens to have brought along, and reads passages from it to illustrate his point that the things from the coffins are an alien race described in the ancient book.  Fellow expedition members mock him.  Conflict erupts among the expedition members, especially when Dyer finds out about his wife and child's demise.  

The scientists manage to crash a plane into the ruins of an ancient, alien city, while Gunnarson, now actually a shoggoth, joins the remaining crew back at the ship.  Larsen escaped the earlier shoggoth attack but is MIA.  The city is explored and revelations about the inhabitants are revealed.   Back on the ship, the shoggoth-impostor wreaks havoc.

An attempt is made to dissect the alien bodies, which goes awry when they turn out to be very much alive and proceed to vivisect one of the scientists.  A confrontation between shoggoths and their former masters ensues aboard the ship.  Dyer and Larsen escape and run around the ice caves arguing.  They eventually make it back to the Arkham, where they're attacked by an army of shoggoths in Gunnarson-form.

Atwood is confronted by a shoggoth in the form of expedition leader Dr. Lake.  The shoggoth-as-lake humiliates Atwood and mocks his religious beliefs.  Larsen dynamites the boat free, but in the process awaken the shoggoths object of worship - Cthulhu hisself!  They escape, Danforth dies, and Dyer ends up a madman, and we're back in the present.  Starkweather doesn't believe his story.  Dyer kills himself, and Starkweather sails for Antarctica.

Holy fuck!  Is that a wild ride or what?

A script is not a film, but can be judged by the merit of its readability and the ease with which one can picture it as a movie, and this one is very readable and easy to picture as a movie.  But I admit the movie I picture from it is a mixed bag.  There's a lot of things I like here:  it captures I think almost all the important, and even less important, details and ideas from Lovecraft's story - and in that sense does him justice.  It would make an exciting and scary film.

But, too often I see routine, trite modern horror movie stuff - crazy guys with axes, lots of blood and gore, and endless riffs on Carpenter's remake of The Thing. Which I happen to like - but the Howard Hawks original is superior.  

I think the most obvious one is the scene of the Elder Things coming to and dissecting a scientist.  Here its explicitly shown, and though, as written, it sounds scary and effective, it also weakens the whole concept.  In the story, Dyer and Danforth only find evidence after the fact - men and dogs killed, the Elder Thing bodies missing, and a man and a dog apparently dissected.  They try to write it off initially as being the work of a crewman gone nuts, be we the reader know damn well what really must have happened.  And its far scarier that way than flat-out showing it happen.

Nonetheless, Del Toro was (is) trying to launch a commercial movie (Tom Cruise was supposed to play Dyer in this production), and gore and shock sell more than subtlety and creeps.

Well, you can't review a film based solely on a screenplay, but I will say this is a very readable and enjoyable screenplay that is easy to visualize as a film, so that's good.  It does a good job of hitting the checkboxes, including all the major (and many minor) scenes, elements, and ideas that HPL included in his story, while still creating something that would be marketable as a big-budget movie in today's market.  I have to give credit for both sides of that, even though I have to confess those things that would make it marketable as a current horror film are the very things I dislike the most.