del Toro talks about returning to Mimic (feature-film of Lovecraftian monsters in the New York underground system) after 15 years…

“Almost 15 years on, and del Toro has returned to the film he once regarded as something of a failure [due to interference by the film studio’s suits]. Digging around in Miramax’s film archives, del Toro salvaged the original footage, and returned with a re-edited cut of Mimic that trims out the second unit material he so disliked, and reinstated the atmospheric or character-based moments that irked studio heads back in the 90s. Out on Blu-ray on 31st October, the Mimic Director’s Cut is about as close as we’ll ever get to the film del Toro had rattling around in his head, before all those creative differences began…”

The DVD of the new cut includes lots of commentary, several ‘making-of’ items including “Reclaiming Mimic”, deleted scenes, and the original storyboard animatics.

One of the great Lovecraftian stories set in the NYC underground, “Far Below”, is to be reissued in the forthcoming Joshi-edited anthology Spawn of the Green Abyss (Centipede Press, sometime far into 2012). The story can also be found in the completely-unavailable Century’s Best Horror Fiction, Vol. 1, and also in the 2003 Wildside reprint of the 1974 book Far Below and Other Horrors from the Pulps.