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LOVECRAFTIAN COSMIC HORROR IS, AT ITS CORE, A NIHILISTIC VIEW OF THE universe that, if accepted, threatens to unravel human epistemology as currently understood. It posits that scientific advances do not offer the prospect of a progressive future but risk revealing our insignificance and powerlessness on a cosmic scale, a philosophy outlined in the opening paragraph to H. P. Lovecraft's iconic short story "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928):
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (139)
As China Miéville notes, "Lovecraft's horror is not one of intrusion but of realization. The world has always been implacably bleak; the horror lies in our acknowledging that fact" (xiii). In such a world, belief in the intrinsic value of human life is a delusion that we cling to in order to remain sane. Thus, cosmic horror fundamentally challenges our anthropocentric understanding of the universe.
It is this unveiling of human insignificance that Ridley Scott's Prometheus stages, as a corporate-sponsored team of scientists follow star maps found in paintings from disparate ancient human civilizations in the hope of meeting the mysterious Engineers that created humankind. The plot bears numerous conceptual and narrative similarities to Lovecraft's novel, At the Mountains of Madness (1936), in which a scientific expedition to Antarctica discovers that life on Earth was created by extraterrestrial colonizers known as the Old Ones, thereby destabilizing Darwinian theories of evolution through natural selection by blurring them with a secret history of alien intelligent design.1 If, as Elizabeth Leane argues, Lovecraft's Antarctica is "the place of ultimate enigma, introducing to the continent beings that, in their amorphousness and mutability, mimic its abject qualities" (65), Scott's narrative moves beyond the...