Unspeakable Horror, Now In Color!: H. P. Lovecraft’s Drawings of The Elder Things

Ever wonder what the Elder Things from H. P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness really looked like? Well, you’ve come to the right place.

The Elder Things looked kinda like giant pteridophytes: about six feet tall, barrel-shaped, with a main body that was leathery and dark-grey, with four-foot long tentacles ending in greenish eight-inch fins on the posterior side, with a yellowish mouth / breathing apparatus at the anterior end, surrounded by more reddish tentacles. And when those tentacles aren’t reaching out for your sanity, they’re folded down to its body.

And I know what you’re thinking: “Rob,” you’re thinking, “How do you have such an accurate knowledge of what these horrible creatures looked like? It’s almost like you have a picture!” Well, funny story: I do. Straight from the man himself.

Lovecraft made at least seven pages of notes in preparation for the writing of At The Mountains of Madness, including one scribbled on the back of an envelope (the only thing more appropriate would be if it was scrawled on a cocktail napkin) that included Lovescraft’s original drawing of an Elder Thing, with a bunch of descriptive notes about the beast. And those notes don’t just include dimensions, but the effects that seeing the thing would have on normal Earthlings, like: “Utter mystery + horror,” “DOGS DISTURBED… DOGS FRANTIC,” and the particularly cryptic (and creepy) isolated note: “mouths & eyes.”

All these pages are currently on public display at an exhibit named The Shadow Over College Street: H. P. Lovecraft in Providence at the Providence Athenaeum in Lovecraft’s home town of Providence, Rhode Island until September 22nd, and what with Providence being less than an hour from the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, we might be taking this exhibit in sometime this month.

But if you’re not local to New England, there’s no need to book a flight to get a look at Lovecraft’s official visual version of the Elder Things; you can check it out for yourself right after the jump.

Just crate your dogs before you click the link.

Guillermo del Toro Working on Dark Universe… Yeah, Basically The 90s Vertigo Comics Movie

Update, 6:40 a.m.: The video after the jump is fixed. What can I say? That Benzedrine’s a hell of a drug.

Guillermo del Toro is finishing up work on Pacific Rim, which will be in theaters in July. And since between movies and books and comics, he seems like a guy who likes to keep busy… you know, in the sense that a methamphetamine addict like to occupy the day by disassembling the television in an attempt to find parts to improve the AK-47 they use to keep the Goddamned bugs away.

Which, as analogies go, certainly is one, but my point is, del Toro probably has another project in mind. And it seems that he does. Is it the adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness that del Toro was working on before the project went tits up? Well, apparently maybe; supposedly he thinks he can get one more bite at that apple, hard R rating and ridiculous budget or no:

“I’m going to try it one more time. Once more into the dark abyss,” he laughed. “We’re gonna do a big presentation of the project again at the start of the year and see if any [studio’s] interested.” And yes, Tom Cruise is still game to be on board if they can find a home for it. “Yeah, Tom is still attached. I think it would be so fantastic to make it with him. He’s been such a great ally of the project.”

Okay, that’s pretty good news… certainly better than the news about the Hulk TV show that del Toro was supposedly working on a few months ago:

“After ‘The Avengers’ there’s been complete radio silence,” he said. “I had one more meeting after ‘Avengers’ with Jeph Loeb from Marvel and he said, ‘We’re working on it, we’re waiting for a writer,’ he gave me the name of the writer and their resume and I said, ‘That sounds great, let’s wait for him’ because we had delivered a teleplay and I haven’t heard since then.”

So yeah, those sound pretty good… but that’s not the good shit. The good shit is that del Toro is apparently working on a project with Warner Bros. A movie including Swamp Thing, John Constantine, Zatanna, Etrigan… pretty much all of the cast of Justice League Dark. And it’s actually in preproduction, with a writer attached and everything.