Lovecraft's Alien: Film Platypus

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H.P. Lovecraft excelled at creating visions of evil that were believable in a materialistic age. His witches, cultists, and eldar gods require no supernatural explanations, and yet resonate every bit as much as anything found in Cotton Mather or Algernon Blackwood. It is no wonder then, that H.R. Giger and screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett turned to H.P.L., particularly his At the Mountains of Madness, in creating the film Alien. Ridley Scott's direction of Alien, Prometheus, and Alien Covenant consciously bathes in the arctic light of Lovecraft's novella.

So after another viewing of Prometheus and Alien Covenant this summer, here are my own interpretations of the alien: part corpse, part machine, part dragon, part demon. It is a secular antichrist, man's failed attempt to become God.

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