May '19
I saw this, for the seventeen bajillionth time, last night at a midnight showing. I guess there really is something special about seeing it on a big screen, because I had an idea that I don't know if I've ever had before, despite having seen the movie, as I said, seventeen bajillion times already.
There are several ideas in the movie that Carpenter probably borrowed from The Quatermass Experiment. There must be a lot of websites, Youtube videos, etc where people talk about this connection. But, I think the short story Beep, by James Blish, or its expanded version The Quincunx of Time, may also have been an influence/inspiration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quincunx_of_Time
This occurred to me because, as I mentioned last night in the shoutbox, I realized that the Professor Birack character is probably inspired by the real theoretical physicist Paul Dirac. Somewhere in my $%&*$#@!ing cluttered apartment I have an anthology of science fiction stories that includes the short story Beep, which I mentioned above. They talk a lot about Paul Dirac in that story.
By the way, I'm pretty sure that another book by the author of Beep, James Blish, was a big inspiration for Mortal Engines, the book that was adapted into the movie of the same title last year. Whoops, I lost control of that sentence, I meant to mention that the James Blish book that probably helped inspire Mortal Engines was called Cities in Flight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight
Other inspirations for Prince of Darkness MIGHT have included Chariots of the Gods, by Erich von Daniken, and a few books that try to connect quantum mechancs and theoretical physics to religion, like The Tao of Physics, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and... there's another one like those books... I'll come back to this thread when I think of it.
There are several ideas in the movie that Carpenter probably borrowed from The Quatermass Experiment. There must be a lot of websites, Youtube videos, etc where people talk about this connection. But, I think the short story Beep, by James Blish, or its expanded version The Quincunx of Time, may also have been an influence/inspiration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quincunx_of_Time
This occurred to me because, as I mentioned last night in the shoutbox, I realized that the Professor Birack character is probably inspired by the real theoretical physicist Paul Dirac. Somewhere in my $%&*$#@!ing cluttered apartment I have an anthology of science fiction stories that includes the short story Beep, which I mentioned above. They talk a lot about Paul Dirac in that story.
By the way, I'm pretty sure that another book by the author of Beep, James Blish, was a big inspiration for Mortal Engines, the book that was adapted into the movie of the same title last year. Whoops, I lost control of that sentence, I meant to mention that the James Blish book that probably helped inspire Mortal Engines was called Cities in Flight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight
Other inspirations for Prince of Darkness MIGHT have included Chariots of the Gods, by Erich von Daniken, and a few books that try to connect quantum mechancs and theoretical physics to religion, like The Tao of Physics, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and... there's another one like those books... I'll come back to this thread when I think of it.
Also, this is interesting: at first, they think that what turns out to be the messages from the future is just a strange, irritating little annoyance. In those stories it is a long beeeeeeep that is included for some reason they don't understand with all the messages they send across space using some strange device based on particle physics. The beeeeeeep turns out, when they decode it, to be messages from the future. PoD is similar, of course, although in PoD the messages come in the form of that dream they all have.
Also also, I wanted to mention that The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters are about looking for parallels between particle physics and Eastern religions and philosophy. To me, it looks like John Carpenter took that basic idea, but tried to apply it to WESTERN religious ideas, and the result was PoD, especially the messages that Lisa decodes, and Brian and Birack discuss.
And so, to sum up, the point of all this is: Dennis Dun is freaking hilarious.
No wait, one more also. An interesting thing about Beep and The Quincunx of Time is that they are sort of like the opposite of The Terminator. Agents for the powerful agency that is in change of keeping humanity safe sometimes get assignments that seem very innocuous on the surface, but are treated as very, very serious matters. By that I mean, an agent is told to sit at a park bench in a public park, and make SURE that a man and woman meet and start chatting. Like, it's a really, really big deal that these two random people get together and strike up a conversation. If one of them gets distracted by something, the agent is supposed to get in there somehow and contrive a situation so they are forced to talk to each other. So, one of the agents (many of them, it is implied) figures out that there is going to be something important about their kids, or at least one of their kids. You see where I'm going with this, it's just like the opposite of The Terminator. But, Beep came out first (in 1954).