About "Prince of Darkness"

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.