The Nightmarish Works of Giger,the Artist behind “Alien”

 The Nightmarish Works of Giger,the Artist behind “Alien”

Chances are, H.R. Giger has given you a nightmare. The Swiss-born painter was responsible for creating one of the most iconic monsters in the history of the human imagination: the xenomorph, the unrelenting alien species that oozes at the center of the Alien film franchise.

If you don’t know the xenomorph by name, you know it by sight: the black, eggplant-shaped head; the dripping stalactite teeth; the sleek, spiky body that can appear strangely human; the weaponized tail. The xenomorph is like Francisco Goya’s Saturn from Saturn Devouring His Son come to life, but as an alien from the furthest, most despairing reaches of space.

Hans Ruedi Giger is best known for shaping Alien’s visual direction, which turns 40 this month. His unique vision continues to inspire, even five years after his death—as proved by the North Bergen High School students whose production of Alien: The Play went viral in March. But Giger’s work as a visual artist extends beyond the sci-fi franchise, combining horror and the grotesque and tapping into our unending fascination of the things that frighten us the most.

Giger’s art practice was molded from an early fascination with “skulls and mummies and things like that,” as he said in 2009, as well as his own childhood fears. Born in 1940 in Chur, Switzerland, he began sketching and drawing as a boy in order to channel his fright from recurring nightmares and strange dreams. “He repeatedly spoke about that,” said Andreas Hirsch, who curated the 2011 show “H.R. Giger Träume und Visionen” (translated as H.R Giger Dreams and Vision) at the Kunst Haus Wien in Vienna and became friends with the artist. According to Hirsch, the Giger family home in Chur fueled his anxieties. “[He] recalled open windows that went to dark alleys, the cellars of that old building that sparked fears in him very early on,” he said. “Those fears were matched with an early fascination that those things had for him.”

Giger also cited growing up in Switzerland during World War II, in close proximity to Nazi Germany, as the source for some of the darkness in his work. As he said to Vice in 2011: “I could feel the atmosphere when my parents were afraid. The lamps were always a bluish dark so the planes would not bomb us.” As Giger came of age during the Cold War, the threats of atomic warfare loomed. “He reacted to it by creating visions that sort of transformed those fears—but not to a happy ending, but in an artistic way that he could handle,” Hirsch said.

Despite protestations from his father, who wanted him to follow his own career path as a pharmacist, Giger studied architecture and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts in Zurich. Upon graduating in the mid-1960s, he set out on a career as an interior designer, but soon decided to pursue visual art full time. He moved first from ink drawings and oil paintings to eventually using an airbrush to create his work.

By the early 1970s, word of Giger’s talent had spread. “He started with exhibitions at galleries or at bars or social spaces,” Hirsch said. “But he quickly somehow developed beyond the confines of the art world.” The artist, who described his style as “biomechanical,” popularized the biomechanical art aesthetic. Notably, his work was featured on the album cover for Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s 1973 record, Brain Salad Surgery, which is widely regarded as a landmark in progressive rock.

Giger even managed to gain the attention of one of the 20th century’s most important artists: Salvador Dalí. Dalí, who Giger cited as an influence, was introduced to his work through a mutual friend, the American painter Robert Venosa. It was Dalí who showed Giger’s work to the Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky when the latter was hoping to cast the famed Surrealist in his ambitious adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel Dune (1965). Jodorowsky enlisted Giger to help with concept art for Dune, but when the project stalled, Giger’s foray into the world of film temporarily came to a halt.

Then, in 1977, Giger published the Necronomicon, the first major collection of his drawings, considered today to be his second-most influential output next to Alien. The title, a reference to a fictional book of magic from the world of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, sets the tone for images that are still startling today: strange mechanical gremlins perch on towering lead pillars; skeletal alien beings look out on mist-covered wastelands; and mutilated, fleshy bodies are hooked up to hulking machinery. All of the drawings are balanced between ghostly white tones—the color of moonlight on concrete—and dark hues that, at times, border on a deep shade of abyss.

Director Ridley Scott encountered the Necronomicon when he saw a copy laying on a desk at the offices of 20th Century Fox, just after he signed on to Alien. “I took one look at it,” Scott told Starlog, a monthly science-fiction magazine, in 1979, “and I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life. I was convinced I’d have to have him on the film.”

The basis for the xenomorph came from two lithographs in the Necronomicon that featured a dark, metallic-looking being with the oblong head that would come to characterize the monster. “They were quite specific to what I envisioned for the film, particularly in the unique manner in which they conveyed both horror and beauty,” Scott wrote in the introduction for the book H.R. Giger’s Film Design (1996). The xenomorph became a cultural icon, appearing in eight films as part of both the core Alien franchise and spin-offs, as well as video games, short films, and countless other pop culture references.