Álex de la Iglesia, the renowned Spanish film-TV director (“Day of the Beast,” “The Last Circus,” “30 Coins”) is set to make this animation debut, helming the animated feature “Ages of Madness: The Howling of the Jinn.”
Set up at the Canary Islands’ 3Doubles Producciones, behind Goya Award nominees “SuperKlaus” and “Norbert,” and Bizkaia-based Sumendi Uhartea, “Ages of Madness” is hailed by 3Doubles as “the first major adult 3D animation production to fully adapt the complex universe of H.P. Lovecraft for the big screen.”
The feature film is set to begin production in late 2026. It weaves what is described as several “tragically intertwined stories” linked by one of Lovecraft’s masterpieces, his imagining of a legendary forbidden book, the “Necronomicon,” whose reading sparks madness or ghastly death. Lovecraft consistently refers to the book in his stories, claimed it contains an account of the Old Ones who ruled before humankind and will rule after it. He hardly reproduces the book’s contents, however, making it all the more sinister.
In De la Iglesia’s film, the book will travel through time across four historical and geographical settings as distant as they are grim, 3Doubles Producciones said Wednesday during the Annecy Animation Festival. “Feeding on humanity’s thirst for forbidden knowledge, ‘Necronomicon’ unleashes madness and the chilling certainty that we are nothing more than dust of the Ancient Ones,” it added, saying the film “explores the fragility of human sanity in the face of the unknown.”
