It's always funny to me when people claim that the prequels washed away anything "Lovecraftian" about the original film when, really, those two films (love 'em, hate 'em, whatever) mostly just open up a whole new can of worms that emphasize the weirder elements of the original Alien (the rapid growth and the ability to bond with and take traits from the host's biological matter, for example) that I would certainly describe as follows:
QuoteLovecraftian horror, sometimes used interchangeably with "cosmic horror" is a subgenre of horror fiction and weird fiction that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or other elements of shock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovecraftian_horrorWe don't completely understand how the pathogen came to be, where it originates from, or the full extent of what can be done with it; we do know, however, that it has built in traits that can be honed and expanded upon, allowing for any entity experimenting with it in tandem with different biological matter to uniquely create or release something as primordial as the Deacon or, in the hands of one who considers himself a rather expert artisan (and a god, all the same), David's "Perfect Organism" that we all know and love from the original films. But those are just seemingly two ends of a rather diverse spectrum of creations, in which a multitude of other "unknowable and incomprehensible" iterations can and presumably do exist, just waiting for a new set of hands to shape and guide the pathogen in a unique, creative way. That's where something like the result of the experimentation in
Into Charybdis becomes really interesting to me...
The division between "science" and "magic" does indeed start to blur, but the pathogen does function, in a sense, like a biomechanical nano-technology, capable of being both reprogramed and grafted onto biological material in such a way that it can yield all manner of "unknowable and incomprehensible" eldritch horrors.
We humans were created by the Enginners simply because they could. Our creation, an android that was created with a similar nonchalant intent, then picked up the pieces left by those old spacefaring gods and surpassing humans in order to create something he deems to be beautiful and perfect. Where does that leave us humans, insignificant pawns navigating this dangerous universe in which we have no true place or cause?