H.R. Giger, the man who created Alien’s alien, dies at 74

Swiss artist Hans “Ruedi” Giger has died from injuries related to a fall he suffered at his home. The painter and sculptor was 74.

If you’re at all a fan of modern science fiction, you’ve encountered the man’s work, possibly without even realizing it. Giger—whose surname is pronounced with a long “e,” like “gee-ger”—most famously designed the monster from Ridley Scott’s Alien, but his contributions to that film were neither the beginning nor the end of a tremendously influential Hollywood career spanning 40 years.

Giger reportedly did not enjoy most of the work he did on movies—he was first and foremost a painter and a sculptor, and he found working under deadline for movie production studios frustrating and unsatisfying. He described his work as “biomechanical”—most typically monochromatic, disquieting sets of images that blended the living and the mechanical together, often with sexual or fetishistic overtones. He developed this trademark style during the mid-1960s while studying design at the School of Commercial Art in Zurich, first working in oils on canvas. Later, he moved on to working freehand with an airbrush—the style of painting with which he is most solidly identified.

Giger was already a well-established artist in his own right when he was approached by auteur director Alejandro Jodorowsky in 1973 to participate in preproduction work on Jodorowsky’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Giger did a number of designs for the film, most notably the Harkonnen world of Giedi Prime, but his first introduction to Hollywood was ultimately a failure–after a few years and a few million dollars, production on Jodorowsky’s Dune spectacularly imploded, leaving behind some fantastic stories and an enduring legacy, but no movie.

However, directly because of the failed project, Giger was hired a few years later by Ridley Scott to work on Alien, a film that involved a number of other Dune alums, including scriptwriter Dan O’Bannon. Alien was already in heavy preproduction and featured art by the likes of Ron Cobb, Chris Foss, and Moebius (Jean Giraud)—Foss and Moebius had contributed significantly to Dune as well. Giger was brought on by Scott after O’Bannon introduced the director to Giger’s work, and Giger’s designs displaced all other preproduction art for the titular monster.

Giger was given tremendous creative freedom on Alien, even temporarily relocating from Zurich to London during the film’s production to hand-sculpt and paint his designs off of the canvas and onto the screen. However, the pressures of filmmaking and the inevitable compromises necessary to transform airbrushed art into soundstage-sized set pieces greatly frustrated Giger. Although the results on screen shocked and stunned audiences, Giger was ultimately unsatisfied that the movie’s visuals never quite matched the biomechanical hell he saw in his mind.

Nonetheless, Alien won Giger an Academy Award for Visual Effects and permanently lodged his distinct style in the mind of the movie-going public. Alien itself became a benchmark in science fiction and horror, and Giger’s work on the film tapped into something primal and terrifying; the creature in the film is itself an iconic design, mixing together unsettling pseudo-sexual visual cues together with good old-fashioned scary grossness. Author Alan Dean Foster penned perhaps the most succinct summary of the monster’s otherness in his novelization of Alien 3:

If only it had eyes, a part of her thought, instead of visual perceptors as yet unstudied. No matter how horrible or bloodshot, at least you could connect with an eye. The windows of the soul, she’d read somewhere.

The alien had no eyes and, quite likely, no soul.

Giger provided visual design assistance to a score of additional movies, sending designs to 20th Century Fox during Alien 3’s tortured development and providing a huge amount of design work for 1995’s Species, but continued to find interacting with Hollywood difficult and frustrating. However, his collaborations weren’t limited to the screen—he also worked with musicians and recording artists on album covers and sculptures and other projects, and contributed architectural designs to several Giger-themed bars.

Throughout his life, the artist suffered from persistent night terrors, and has said that most of his art is directly or indirectly influenced by the things he saw when he closed his eyes. Over the past decades, the man’s nightmares have helped shape the design direction of movies and television and video games; though he paid a high price for his visions, there are few other artists who have so completely altered the collective unconscious of the world.