Well-known Mexican director Guillermo del Toro is going back to horror with Crimson Peak, one that's been gestating for a while.
He had recently discussed a Pacific Rim sequel with the folks at Legendary and said that he wants to do something ‘in a different genre that's not so big.' That genre is obviously a haunted house films, the film genre that won't die.
Crimson Peak, one of the many projects that del Toro has been attached for a number of years, he wrote with collaborator Matthew Robbins and initially sold it as a spec script to Universal.
The movie seems staked out by many of our favorite haunted house movies, such as The Haunting all the way up to Kubrick's version of The Shining. Del Toro told Deadline,
(it's) another Mount Everest of the haunted house movie. I loved the way that Kubrick had such control over the big sets he used, and how much big production value there was. I think people are getting used to horror subjects done as found footage or B-value budgets. I wanted this to feel like a throwback.
He also described Crimson Peak as:
a very set-oriented, classical but at the same time modern take on the ghost story. It will allow me to play with the conventions of the genre I know and love, and at the same time subvert the old rules.
This doesn't mean his adaptation of HP Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness is dead; on the contrary, he hopes to finally get the film made with Legendary:
They love (At the Mountains of Madness), but we just finished Pacific Rim. They want to let that film happen [it opens July 12] and then my hope is, down the line we can do it.
This guy is not giving up that easily. He is eyeing a February 2014 start for Crimson Peak.
Stay tuned.
