Albert Einstein is often misquoted as saying the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. If that’s true, then Guillermo del Toro may be driving himself mad trying to adapt H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. Originally published in Astounding Stories, the serial tells the story of an expedition to Antarctica that discovers an ancient city and its weird gods and even weirder architecture. The passion project almost got underway in 2011 — with Tom Cruise starring, no less — when Universal killed the project over the director’s insistence on an R rating. But the dead project lies dreaming deep within del Toro’s heart. After the success of the auteur’s Pinocchio at Netflix, he’s hoping to get a stop-motion version off the ground. “I said it would be ideal to do ‘Mountains of Madness’ as stop-motion,†he told IndieWire. “You watch the animation in a more rapturous way than live action. It’s almost a hypnotic act, and the relationship to the story becomes more intimate in that way.†The Pan’s Labyrinth director also said he’d spoken to Empire Strikes Back VFX artist Phil Tippett about animating the doomed Antarctic expedition and its eldritch geometry.