He's portly, he's got a bad beard and glasses, and he could easily pass for every other dork at Comic-Con who has a basement full of old Silver Age comic books and very little direction in life. But Guillermo Del Toro, whose name translates to William of the Bull, differs vastly from those who would confuse him with the Internet Neckbeards who float in the fanboy circles, even if he knows exactly what they like before they do.
He's got Hellboy 2: The Golden Army coming out this year, which will hopefully make up for forcing a love story into the first installment of the much-beloved gruff demon/government agent's story. He's riding high on his Pan's Labyrinth success, one of the best and darkest fairy tales ever on film, and he's produced a much-ballyhooed thriller The Orphanage, in theaters right now. Let's not forget Blade II, either.
His planned future projects are what truly cements his status as King of Nerd Movies. The first is his work to bring an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness to the silver screen, which promises to be an absolute visual feast if Del Toro's vision holds true, having heard the Call of Cthulu. He talked about it to MTV.
“I remember when I was a kid out of the studios came the big event horror movies, ‘The Exorcist,’ ‘Alien,’ ‘Jaws,’ ‘The Shining,’” del Toro recalled. “It is my hope that this movie will be a tentpole movie [of that sort]. It has the scope of a Shackleton epic exploration movie but it’s full of tentacled things.”
Is it ever. Originally published in 1936, Lovecraft’s “Madness” centers on a group of explorers who stumble onto an ancient city in Antarctica. There they find living creatures dubbed “Elder Things,” living embodiments of fear and madness and pure crap your pants terror (Put THAT on a poster).
But to Del Toro, what makes the story particularly alluring is the opportunity it gives him to impose some of his own inventiveness.
“It’s not hard to be faithful to Lovecraft because what is great about the novel is that it’s a compilation of really dry scientific annotations that happen to be annotating something really scary. There is no character or dramatic thread,” he insisted. “You take those document and you then create a story. If you were [just rigidly faithful] you would be doing a National Geographic special on a crew that disappeared in an exploration mission.
The second, according to THR, is the fact that he's in talks to step into Peter Jackson's shoes to take the helm of the pair of films based on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, with Jackson remaining on as producer. The directorial choice for this project will be heavily scrutinized, but it's highly unlikely that anyone could be disappointed with the choice of Del Toro to fill the aforementioned shoes. (Insert your own "Peter Jackson weight loss" reference here).
Nerds everywhere hold out hope that maybe, someday, he'll take on a comic-book occultist like Marvel's Dr. Strange, or D.C.'s Dr. Fate... or even Detective Chimp.
