‘At The Mountains Of Madness’ PG-13?

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft has long been a passion project for director Guillermo del Toro, and to hear him tell it, it’s come close to being made on several occasions.

However, once Lovecraft fans hear his plans for it, they may want to call the whole thing off.

That’s because del Toro thinks he can make it as a PG-13 horror film and still be faithful to the work. The disappointing news was revealed in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal. His words:

I said to them, that’s the movie that I would really love to do one day, and it’s still expensive, it’s still … I think that now, with the way I’ve seen PG-13 become more and more flexible, I think I could do it PG-13 now, so I’m going to explore it with [Legendary], to be as horrifying as I can, but to not be quite as graphic. There’s basically one or two scenes in the book that people don’t remember that are pretty graphic. Namely, for example, the human autopsy that the aliens do, which is a very shocking moment. But I think I can find ways of doing it. We’ll see. It’s certainly a possibility in the future. Legendary was very close to doing it at one point, so I know they love the screenplay. So, we’ll see. Hopefully it’ll happen. It’s certainly one of the movies I would love to do.

If you read any Lovecraft, you know how difficult it would be to do At the Mountains of Madness in anything less than an R. While it is true that PG-13 films have come a long way in what they can show, most agree that a sanitized version of the human autopsy alone would be impossible to do effectively.

Of course, you never can tell.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2010) turned out pretty horribly, and that was with del Toro and company keeping the R rating.

According to an interview with the L.A. Times around the film’s release, del Toro had this to say: “We originally thought we could shoot it as PG-13 without compromising the scares…. And then the MPAA came back and gave us a badge of honor. They gave us an R for ‘pervasive scariness.’ We asked them if there’s anything we could do, and they said, ‘Why ruin a perfectly scary movie?'”

Not sure what movie any of them were watching there, but whatever.

In other news, the director recently dished on the details for Pacific Rim 2. Now that, we’re looking forward to.

Do you think At the Mountains of Madness should be R or PG-13, Lovecraft fans? Sound off in our comments section.