Guillermo del Toro working on “gothic” Pinocchio with Nick Cave?

Last Updated on July 23, 2021

Oh Guillermo del Toro, will you ever not keep announcing new projects?

We know the man has more than a few things on his plate right now: AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS, THE HAUNTED MANSION, the impending release of DON’T BE AFRIAD OF THE DARK… just to name a few. How the guy even manages to sleep at night is beyond me, but he’s still walking and talking, so obviously he hasn’t died from sleep deprivation yet. Not content to just have the above-mentioned flicks on the horizon, del Toro has evidently embarked on another out-of-left-field journey: PINOCCHIO.

In a chat with Capone over at Aint It Cool News, del Toro revealed that he is, indeed, updating the classic tale. Not necessarily “horror” news, you might say, but the devil is in the details: “We are working actively now on preproduction on PINOCCHIO, the stop-motion PINOCCHIO, with music by Nick Cave. It’s a really beautiful–I wouldn’t say “dark,”–but it’s a much more somber, much more gothic take on the [Carlo] Collodi tale that preserves some of the darker moments in Collodi that were absolutely terrifying when you first read them as a kid.”

When you think about it, PINOCCHIO is a pretty freaky tale. A wooden dummy transformed into a flesh-and-blood child? Bizarro. So that combined with the atmosphere of a del Toro project and Nick Cave doing the music make me think this could definitely end up being some chilling stuff.

You have to wonder if del Toro will refer to the original version of PINOCCHIO… Via Wikipedia: Collodi originally had not intended the novel as children’s literature; the ending was unhappy and allegorically dealt with serious themes. In the original, serialized version, Pinocchio dies a gruesome death—hanged for his innumerable faults, at the end of Chapter 15.

Can’t understand why Disney didn’t go that route… For more info on how f*cked up the original PINOCCHIO story was, head on over HERE.