Cruel Guillermo del Toro teases world with glimpse at his never-made At The Mountains Of Madness

There was a minute there—especially back before The Shape Of Water won Best Picture, reminding all involved that it rarely pays to bet against him—when Guillermo del Toro had become more associated with unmade projects than completed ones. Hellboy sequels, the abortive Justice League Dark, his version of The Hobbit films: There’s a reason del Toro is the rare successful creator who has a distinct Wikipedia page for all the movies he hasn’t made across the decades.

For a certain kind of nerd, the crown jewel of that unseen collection has got to be At The Mountains Of Madness, del Toro’s attempt to bring H.P. Lovecraft to a mass movie-going audience. Green-lit by Universal Pictures, and backed by del Toro’s friend James Cameron (at the height of his “I just made the planet’s most successful movie—again” powers), it seemed like a lock that del Toro’s exploration of Lovecraft’s taste for the inhuman would make it to the screen. But instead, a series of delays put multiple hitches in production—and when he deduced that Ridley Scott’s then-upcoming Prometheus would cover similar plot territory, vis a vis humanity’s uncomfortable missing link to uncaring and malevolent gods, del Toro ultimately pulled the plug on the project.

All well and good, until today, when the beautiful bastard decided to taunt us with a glimmer of what we could have gotten. Specifically, del Toro released, via his Instagram, a clip from an early CGI test for the film. Produced by ILM, the images are just for a test-rig (the film itself would have had live-action humans, we believe) but damn, but does that creature crawling out of the ice and snow look good. (You know, in a “What if a flesh mantis came popping out of a giant alien foreskin” kind of way.) It’s cruel, is what it is, teasing us with what might have been—and reminding us to go check out del Toro’s new Netflix series Cabinet Of Curiosities to get our fix, instead.