H.R. Giger was the guy who made me sleep with the lights on for years.
The iconic Swiss painter and sculptor, who died yesterday at the age of 74, reportedly suffered from night terrors for much of his life, so perhaps his inimitable art was his revenge upon the world. He is usually called a “surrealist,” but millions of people who couldn’t name another one of those knew him as the guy who created the titular beast for Ridley Scott’s classic 1979 horror film Alien — a dripping, phallic insect with a long, serrated tail and a spring-loaded second jaw that shoots out of its glistening mouth. A thing with teeth inside of a thing with teeth.
You wouldn’t expect this particular creation to become a consensus candidate, but it did. Decades after Alien hit theatres (the picture will turn 35 Memorial Day weekend), the creature’s status as the cinema’s most nightmarish beast is untouched. Even subsequent movie monsters designed by Giger, who became a hot commodity after Alien, can’t come close.
Giger was in his late thirties when Scott hired him to create not just a monster (based on the one seen in Giger’s painting “Necronomicon IV”), but to design much of the film surrounding it. Giger created the first half of his creature’s two-stage life-cycle — the crab-like “facehugger” that affixes itself to its victim’s face and then implants a fast-maturing embryo inside the host’s abdomen that will later explode from the chest.
He also designed the horseshoe-shapted alien craft where the unlucky crew of the Earth-based freighter Nostromo encounters a patch of sweaty, translucent eggs. Those were his designs, too. Like many of the creatures in Giger’s paintings, these elements all seemed to posit a technology wherein rib cages and sex organs of both genders were the primary building materials. (Alien won an Oscar for its visual effects; it was nominated for art direction but lost to All That Jazz.)