This past year, I've discovered the wonder of public domain online books. Read all the Howard "Conan" stories, catching up on various children's books I should have read--Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, etc. Just finished Ivanhoe. I decided next I needed something lighter than "Paradise Lost" but meatier than "Peter Pan," so I'm taking a foray into Lovecraft. I gave a Lovecraft fan friend a Miskatonic University Antarctic Expedition 1930-31 T-shirt as a birthday present, so it seemed fitting to dive into "At the Mountains of Madness": http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0600031h.html#11 . Like "Ivanhoe" I can't resist reading it with a consideration of how it would adapt to the screen. Right off, it runs into the challenge you have with "Dracula" and "Frankenstein," in that it is told in the past tense in a prose format. "Dracula" is composed in large part out of journal entries, letters, and newspaper articles. "Frankenstein" is a ships log, recounting the tale told by a dying Dr. Frankenstein to the captain. "At the Mountains of Madness" (AMM) is an open letter from one of the survivors of an ill-fated Antarctic expedition, attempting to dissuade future explorers. That is really hard to do in a visual format. You can show someone writing or typing and then fade to a voiceover, but it's hard to do that without looking hokey. You can just ignore the framing device and tell the story, but you throw away something that works so well in the book. I'm not sure what the answer is at this point. The thing I'm absolutely sure of is how much the story has in common with the "Alien" prequel, "Prometheus." Explorers travel to an inhospitable, far away land on an expedition and find something unexpected. Shit happens. 'Nuff said for now, but the parallels are really quite uncanny. Were H.R. Giger not dead and if Ridley Scott did an adaptation of this I suspect it would be impossible for critics to miss the similarity.
