10 Unmade Guillermo Del Toro Projects That Look Awesome

6. Drood

Historical drama is something that del Toro has at least some experience with. Both Pan's Labyrnith and The Devil's Backbone use the very real atrocities committed during the Spanish Civil War as the backdrop to supernatural horror, and (despite the fairy tale trappings) for the most part he manages to be true to facts of those events. But he's never done a full-blown period film starring actual historical figures. Which might be what drew him to Drood, an adaptation of the Dan Simmons novel about the final years of Charles Dickens' life. The Simmons book took some notable liberties with the fact, taking in all manner of other famous Victorian characters and adding a thriller plot, but, hey, it's still based on true events. It sounds a bit like The Raven, basically, where a fictionalised Edgar Allen Poe got caught up in a spooky conspiracy. Maybe those similarities stalled the project. Which is a shame, because del Toro would surely have delighted in recreating an idealised version of gothic, smog-filled Victorian England, and of playing with Dickens as a troubled hero.