leading from
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| The ithyphallic beast in Necronom IV |
One might stop to take a look here at Dan O'Bannon's story from his time working on Dune in Paris, about how Jodorowsky had found a PhD thesis that was a study of the actual Necronomicon thought by the public to have been a product H P Lovecraft's dreams and writings and soon he discovered HR Giger who was providing images of majestic demons of a Lovecraftian nature that inspired Dan with ideas for his Alien script. He would visualise it as a Giger painting and Giger would be the one to design the monster. (See: Dune and the gathering)
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| ithyphallic Pazuzu statue with erect male member in The Exorcist |
As it went, Dan becoming quite serious about introducing the new demon into the public consciousness and of course what a demon it would be. If the Necronomicon study found in the library was as real as Dan might have wanted to believe it was and it had inspired Dan in some strange way to say what he did about it being a demon, we might start asking ourselves again exactly what exactly is the nature of this thing that Dan had unleashed.
c) Ithyphallic Demons with four wings
This demon would make the actions of Pazuzu who had been unleashed onto the public by way of The Exorcist in 1973 seem like funhouse evil, and Pazuzu turned out to be a character from Assyrian and Babylonian mythology, king of the demons of the wind, and son of the god Hanbi. Pazuzu stood with four wings extending from his back, and often shown with an erect male member and Giger's biomechanoid started out in the painting as a large erect male member extending from its groin (which Ridley compared to an umbilical cord) and numerous pipes and winged membranes extending from the back while the creature eventually have an long tail that at times would extend from the front and have four pipes sticking out from its back and Giger wasn't quite sure whether they were wings or pipes. The four pipes on Giger's beast were there in his 1976 Necronom IV painting. What exactly was this all about? Are Pazuzu and Giger's Alien distant relatives with the same four winged gene, but the ones on Giger's Alien had transformed into useless stunted limbs? (see Pazuzu)
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| the ithyphallic Pazuzu |
d) Bringing the Necronomicon to Public Consciousness
Decades after Alien, Dan watched how there had been numerous books marketed under the name of the Necronomicon but when you opened them they turned out not to be the real thing and he became very impatient of these fictional Necronomicons certainly because they were unrealistic and as far as he could understand, he had seen something very close to a real thing. Towards the end of his life, he he spent a good ten years carefully translating the contents of the thesis into English and finally got it to a point where it was ready to be seen by the public at large and all that remained for him was to discover a way to market it so that people who wanted a copy could obtain it, before he passed on in 2009 and soon it is to be published by his widow Diane.
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| "Umbilical" Alien or "Ithyphallic" Alien |
Source Quotes
- Interviewer:Now, you have an obvious interest in Lovecraft and arcane things and Lovecraft's circle people as well. Can you talk about your project the Necronomicon a little bit, what drove you to start to do that?
O'Bannon: Well now, i came across this project in a very mysterious way, back in 1975 I was in Paris working with Alejandro Jodorowsky, actually on a film then, and he was very much a mystic and you might say for a time he was my guru, and he discovered something in the Bibliotech National, a er, a document, and it was someone's PhD thesis and he brought it to my attention and I looked at it and it turned out to be a study of the Necronomicon, the real Necronomicon, the closest I had ever gotten to the actual original text, and I was so struck by this that I felt it needed to be brought to the attention of English speaking readers, so I spent the better part of ten years carefully translating this into English and I finally got it to a point where it's ready to be seen by the public at large. All that remains is a … to discover a way to market this so that people who want a copy can obtain it.
Interviewer: So this document, was it written by multiple individuals
O'Bannon: No, it was a, it was a PhD thesis of a student at the erm, was it the Sarbonne or something, i forget the…. he certain quoted many other individuals but it's primarily written, a long essay quoting substantial chunks of the Necronomicon from different translations obviously, the Latin translation, the Greek translation, the English translation, and this author had managed to obtain... the opportunity the book had originally copies, copy extensive passages from the, because it was then the last several years, a couple of books marketed under the name of the Necronomicon, but when you open them, they turn out not to be the real thing. So i became very impatient with these erm fictional Necronomicons and at least I saw the real thing (2009 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival: Dan O'Bannon's "Howie" Acceptance Speech) - Shadowlocked: Did O’Bannon’s Rules Of Writing ever make it to press?
Dan O'Bannon: It did not. It’s just sitting over on a corner of my desk, gathering dust. Over the years I’ve read a couple of Necronomicons published. I bought and read them and I was very disappointed, and I finally got annoyed. At the very least if you’re going to write a nNecronimicon, it should be scary…I just started compiling notes, and by the time it was done I realised I had a book. It’s not a long book, but it shouldn’t be long. It’s certainly dense. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Jekyll and Hyde…?
Shadowlocked: Yes, I have.
Dan O'Bannon: When you read it, you feel you’ve read a novel, but if you go back and count the pages, you realise there’s only forty pages. My Necronomicon is like that; it’s very dense but it’s not hundreds of pages long, at which point it would become dull. So it’s almost done, but I’ve had various things in my life getting in the way of completing it.
Shadowlocked: So this is something we can look forward to in the near future, maybe?
Dan O'Bannon: Absolutely. It should have been done a year ago, but family problems intervened, so huge that I just didn’t have the time to write anymore. Things are starting to smooth out now again at last, so if I do anything at all next, it’s going to be to finish that and get it out. So much of it is finished, it’d just be a crime not to finish it... ( Shadowlocked.com 2007) - Daily Grindhouse: Can you give us a feel for that project?
Diane O'Bannon: It’s very interesting how he did this. He has a backstory on how he found it. It’s actually the dissertation of a PhD student. Alejandro Jodorowsky told Dan that it existed in Sarbonne (University of Paris library) and he went and found it. Now the student -the PhD student who wrote the dissertation – vanished. Nobody knows what happened to him. So, Dan felt free to take the information and use it. The PhD student actually found The Necronomicon. He wasn’t a believer, but he did the most research on it, so Dan is basically putting out his version of the dissertation. (dailygrindhouse.com 2011) - Dan O'Bannon: I wanted to raise movie monsters to a new level. I wanted to introduce a new demon into public consciousnesss, and I wanted to speak directly to the unconscious. That demon in "The Exorcist" was just funhouse evil. I very definitely wanted the audience to have a feeling of extraordinary primal evil, which is why I made it a sexual carnivore. (Washington Post, July 29th, 1979)
- HR Giger: Mia created the wings or whatever they're supposed to represent (Giger's Alien Diaries, June 10th 1978, p207)
- HR Giger: The four wings or tubes were broken and had to be attached with wires (Giger's Alien diaries, September 6th 1978, p539)
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