Guillermo del Toro just joined Instagram, and in less than a week, he’s already one of the most interesting people to follow on the app. He’s shared photos from his home (which looks like something out of a horror movie), early tests of the puppet from his upcoming Pinocchio, and interesting objects from his movie collection. But for del Toro fans, the coolest moment came last night, when del Toro shared footage from one of his unmade projects.
For years, del Toro tried to make a movie version of At the Mountains of Madness, the famous science-fiction story by horror legend H.P. Lovecraft. From the mid-2000s through the mid-2010s, del Toro repeatedly attempted a version of At the Mountains of Madness. Despite his best efforts, the project never came together.
Even though del Toro never made the film, he did create some test footage for it. And that’s what he shared on Instagram. In the caption he wrote this was an “all CGI test” from Industrial Light and Magic for At the Mountains of Madness from a decade ago. The footage had never been seen before outside of Hollywood.
It looks … really disturbing.
Although del Toro abandoned At the Mountains of Madness a while ago, this sort of social media post has, in other past cases, actually gotten unmade projects greenlit. Deadpool was basically dead in the water until test footage that Ryan Reynolds and Tim Miller had made in 2012 leaked online in 2014. The response to the sequence was so positive, that Fox finally put the film into production. So if you want to see Guillermo del Toro’s At the Mountains of Madness, I’d send that Instagram post to all my friends.
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio premieres on Netlfix on December 9.
