o’bannon and lovecraft
Over at ↑Strange Shapes they have a fine article on ‘↑The Engineer Mythos.’ Here’s the opening paragraph:
When ↑Dan O’Bannon was twelve years old he stumbled across an old anthology of stories in a book store. He paid the nickel and took it home. Inside was a story titled The Colour Out of Space, by ↑HP Lovecraft. “I stayed up all night reading the thing, and it just knocked my socks off,” O’Bannon said. In Lovecraft’s fiction the universe is a source of both awe and terror. Humanity’s dominion over the world is illusory. Revelation is destructive and victory is often paltry, if attainable at all. Humans are beleaguered by demons, devils, minor and major gods, and chthonic beings. Lovecraft would go on to inspire O’Bannon’s creative life, with ↑HR Giger telling Cinefantastique in 1988 that Dan was “definitely one of the greatest Lovecraft experts around.” In 1979 Giger and O’Bannon brought their own form of Lovecraftian terror to the screen with ↑Alien, which according to Dan, “went to where the ↑Old Ones lived, to their very world of origin … That baneful little storm-lashed planetoid halfway across the galaxy was a fragment of the Old Ones’ home-world, and the Alien a blood relative of ↑Yog-Sothoth.” Whilst Lovecraft’s influence on Alien was expressed as a very palpable undertone, in ↑Prometheus Lovecraft’s notions of alien creators would be embodied further through the daemonic Engineer race. [hyperlinks inserted by me]
What a wonderful connection between Lovecraft and ↵cyberpunk :)