We here
at The A.V. Club dimly remember the source material, a craptastic 1997 paperback that read like a middle - schooler's
impression of Michael Crichton and basically only existed to be sold to a Hollywood studio and made into a movie — a sort of Cowboys &
Aliens avant la lettre.
At Art in America Constance Mallinson reported that the initial
impression was of a grisly house of horrors or a makeup shop for an
alien movie, but then a wider range of references emerged — Gothic grotesques, Buddhist demon iconography, Goya's Caprichos, a repertoire of Surrealist and Expressionist facial distortions, and even animated characters like Shrek and the Incredible Hulk.