Jonesing for a big screen adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness? Upset after del Toro’s stab at it failed? Congratulations, there’s already an A+ Mountains movie… or two of them… er, I mean…let me explain.

I’m going to start with giving a quick rundown of Mountains’ plot, so bear with me here. At the Mountains of Madness: A scientific expedition to Antarctica discovers a crazy huge and uncharted mountain range, and some of the scientists camp at the base to study the mountains. They discover an ancient race of aliens. Stuff happens, scientists die. The last two scientists standing discover a cyclopean city snuggled into the mountain range; they learn that the alien race arrived at Earth long ago and created a slave race of creatures (shoggoths). The kicker here is that all other life on Earth was created by accident while the aliens built the shoggoths. The scientists are chased away by some gigantic “thing.”

Let’s list a couple of key plot points:

Scientific expedition to Antarctica
Giant unknown mountains/city in Antarctica
alien master race; amorphous/shape changing slave race
human life created accidentally as a by-product/unimportant to creators
Giant monster at the end (portends the end of life on Earth?)

Okay, we’re at least on the same page as far as the story goes. Now for the movies—I want to draw your attention to two movies. The first probably isn’t too hard to guess: John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). For the second…deep breath…promise not to tar and feather me? Okay here goes: Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012). Yeah, I know. Apparently, everyone else hated this movie, but I really liked it. Maybe it doesn’t work so well as a prequel to Alien (maybe it’s kind of cheap to throw the xenomorph in at the end), but I enjoyed it as a science fiction-horror movie and as an upside-down adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness.

The point of this essay is to go through how both movies perfectly adapt different points of Mountains, and if mashed together comprise a better movie, and a better adaptation, than any “official” adaptation of Mountains we’ll ever get. I suggest you’ve seen both movies and read the novella at some point in your life before reading the article (and if you haven’t, what are you doing with your life?).

Like with Mountains, I’m going to start with a rundown of The Thing. A scientific expedition to Antarctica is disturbed by a helicopter trying to kill a sled dog. A trip over to the helicopter’s camp and our heroes learn about the un-icing of an alien spaceship and the subsequent release of a creature. What follows is a suspenseful, gory struggle against an alien being that absorbs and metamorphizes into any living being it can get its amorphous tentacles on. The scientists must keep the alien from getting back to civilization or else the world is doomed. At the end of the movie, two of our heroes sit among the fiery remains of the camp, watching each other, each wondering if the other is the creature. Best case for humankind: both men freeze to death before help arrives.

Now for Prometheus: The discovery of a clue to mankind’s origins on Earth leads a team of explorers to a distant planet. Two brilliant young scientists lead the expedition that eventually lands on a planet with giant, pyramid-like structures. They meet a race of godlike beings who created life on Earth but who are disgusted by their creations. Craziness happens next, but it’s not relevant to Mountains.

Here’s a shitty table looking at relevant (really? “relevant” twice in two sentences?) parts of both movies.

THE THING
PROMETHEUS


Antarctic scientific expedition
Scientific expedition


Discovery of long slumbering, shape-changing alien race.
Uncharted, ancient city discovered


Human-kind in peril
Humans were created by alien race that is unhappy with its creation

NOTE: The Thing carries a claustrophobic atmosphere of being assaulted/trapped by the frigid weather. Prometheus is a dark, atmospheric movie as well, along with the horror at discovering humanity’s genesis.

Basically, if you take away the movie titles and leave behind the plot points you have Mountains: An Antarctic scientific expedition discovers an uncharted, ancient city and a long slumbering, shape-changing alien race. You may have to squint a bit at Prometheus to get Mountains (not so much at The Thing), but hopefully, I’m somewhat articulate and you get where I’m coming from. Just don’t watch Prometheus as an Alien movie (ignore Ridley Scott, IMDB, and everywhere else), watch it as a loose Mountains adaptation and as a sci-fi-horror flick.

EXTRA CREDIT: Time for a little thought experiment (psst…this is why I wrote this art-tickle). I want to you pretend you’re watching The Thing. I’m going to give you the synopsis of a Mountains film, using The Thing as the template while interjecting specific attributes from Prometheus and tweaking certain explanations. Get ready for the ultimate Mountains adaptation that’s already been made.

Opening: We’re going to nix The Thing’s spaceship opening and insert the opening for Prometheus. 2 billion years ago, a spacecraft lands on Earth, a humanoid alien (we’re going to exaggerate his features a bit more than Prometheus; think 8 feet tall, four arms, large skull) drinks an iridescent liquid and then dissolves into a waterfall. The alien’s DNA strands mix with the water.

Title: Helicopter chasing Malamute. Continues like The Thing. McCready and Dr. Cooper fly over to Nords’ camp just like in the movie. They find a burned down camp and… instead of a partially uncovered spacecraft, they find an excavation site, a tunnel leading into the ice.

McCready and Cooper follow the steps into the ice and turn a corner to find a massive cavern filled with giant pyramid-like buildings lined up (Prometheus scene when they first discover the pyramids, except these are beneath the ice instead of on an alien planet) (also, these structures are the “Mountains of Madness.” Since we know there are no gigantic mountains in Antarctica, these mountain-shaped structures are hidden under the ice).

Cut to the kennel scene in Thing, all this happens with McCready and Cooper gone. Childs takes charge at base camp.

While crazy shit happening back at camp, McCready and Cooper discover control with sleeping “creator” aliens in chairs, just like in Prometheus. Cooper fiddles with buttons on computers and accidentally opens some files. The pair watch 3-dimensional history video: creator aliens land on Earth (throwback to opening scene), they begin to build a civilization. The creators experiment to build amorphous creatures to build and work for them (shoggoth/thing). As a shout-out to the original story, a creature develops from the by-product, a bubbling mass of throw-away fluid, a cucumber-shaped animal. Time passes as creators watch over shoggoths building their “mountains,” and eventually notice the cucumber animals. They force the shoggoths/things to destroy the cucumber animals. (but generations have passed and the cucumbers’ fecal matter is in the soil and water—life on Earth as we know it develops from the shit of an accidental by-product tossed aside by the creators as they built shoggoths/the thing) Later, the shoggoths rise up against the creators. The creators manage to imprison the last few shoggoths and then induce Cyro-type-sleep.

There’s a loud noise and a tremor in the cavern and McCready and Cooper flee back to their camp with the knowledge of what they’re dealing with and humanity’s humble beginnings. They agree not to share the details of what they learned. The pair arrives back at camp amid the chaos following the kennel scene in the original movie. The rest of the movie basically follows the plot of The Thing, with the exception of occasional tremors that shake the camp and at some point, McCready shares what he and Cooper learned at Nord camp.

END: McCready and Childs staring at each other amid the burned-out ruins of their camp. The largest tremor yet occurs and the ice cracks. From the cracks, tendrils like the mid-transition Thing reach out. Either several or one large Thing/shoggoth pulls itself out of the ice below, free at last to eat/change/spread across the Earth. AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS.

[image error]Nicholas Roerich

 

I think this would be a better Mountains adaptation than even del Toro would’ve put forth, and the best part, 99% of that footage is already out there. You can already watch that movie. I basically described The Thing while smashing in a couple of scenes from Prometheus. This is how I think of both movies, separately and together.

The horror of this works on three levels: personal—characters we know are fighting this creature and are dying, all while being trapped by the setting. global—this giant/multiple shoggoth(s) at the end can’t be defeated by McCready and Childs; it’s going to get out and wreak havoc on all current life on Earth. Cosmic—life on Earth is a joke, an accident. It isn’t some glory bestowed by a loving creator or even a natural marvel due to evolution. Life on Earth is a result of the shit left behind by a by-product that developed from the trash of another creation.

At the Mountains of Madness is already adapted, partially twice and whole once, and it’s glorious. Do yourself a favor, go back and read the novella, then watch the two movies. As an extra, read “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell and watch the original adaptation, Howard Hawkes’s The Thing from Another Planet.

So what do you think of the mash-up? Any other films you’d throw into the ring? Pour on the hate, I’ve got my… Actually, I can’t find my umbrella. Shit. Never mind.

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