http://www.jasoncolavito.com/lovecraft-in-bergier.html

As to London, I stand by my original statement.

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/pauwels-bergier-and-lovecraft.html

I also guarantee you more people read London’s story than ever read Lovecraft until the Lovecraft revival in the 60s. London was one of the most popular writers of his time and Lovecraft was a marginal figure at best.

It’s just like the question of his famous cosmicism. He obviously didn’t develop this attitude spontaneously, as a matter of sheer original thinking. And his influences were pointedly not just philosophical but literary, and in a very direct way. Abraham Merritt’s THE METAL MONSTER begins with a paragraph that reads like it must have served as a direct model, whether conscious or unconscious, for HPL when he wrote the (eventually famous) opening paragraph to “The Call of Cthulhu.” Merritt wrote, “In this great crucible of life we call the world — in the vaster one we call the universe — the mysteries lie close packed, uncountable as grains of sand on ocean’s shores. They thread, gigantic, the star-flung spaces; they creep, atomic, beneath the microscope’s peering eye. They walk beside us, unseen and unheard, calling out to us, asking why we are deaf to their crying, blind to their wonder. Sometimes the veil drops from a man’s eyes, and he sees — and speaks of his vision.” Hell, this one even sounds like it must have inspired some of Lovecraft’s imagined lines from the NECRONOMICON that appear in “The Dunwich Horror.”

But this doesn’t invalidate Lovecraft’s originality in digesting and appropriating these ideas and emotions for his own life, work, and psyche, nor the personal-ness of his doing so. Nor does it change or invalidate the fact that he’s the person with whom such thoughts and ideas are most widely and closely associated in popular memory and mainstream literary history. Everybody has influences. Nothing is ultimately, wholly original. But sometimes we can validly identify where, practically speaking, a given buck really does stop.

Personally, I don’t think Scott’s invocation of von Däniken’s name hurts things in the least. The “mythic” impact of it (as we might say) is to interlace the increasingly frequent and prominent real-world speculations — from hard scientific quarters, no less — about extraterrestrial life and the possibility of terrestrial life having been seeded by an extraterrestrial source, to the daimonic psychological underworld or otherworld of UFOlogy, conspiracies, occult/alternate history, cryptoterrestrials, and so on, which von Däniken clearly inhabits. The human psyche resonates powerfully with these tropes regardless of their factual truth value (and in a way that, to my mind, indicates the existence of a middle/liminal category of reality bridging the fact/fiction divide). Mixing up the hard scientific and technological aspects of PROMETHEUS’ futuristic vision with these paranormal-ish, von Däniken-esque themes seems roughly parallel to, say, Mary Shelley’s overt mingling of cutting-edge early 19th-century scientific research and experimentation with the spiritual/philosophical legacy of the ancient alchemists and the Gothic genre’s doppelganger trope in FRANKENSTEIN. For me, it just enhances the whole thing.

The trailers are truly spectacular.

@Pump:
Prequel, as it is used here, is merely a way to indicate that the film is set in the same universe as the Alien film. The writers and Scott have clearly stated that the film is not constricted or “directly” linking to the events of the Alien film.