HR Giger: The Complete Story
A creature that is part skeleton, part machine, part nightmare, slick and biological and metallic all at once. When the monster in the film Alien first appeared, audiences had never seen anything like it. The man who designed it was HR Giger, the Swiss artist who painted the inside of bad dreams.
He was a Swiss artist famous for his dark, biomechanical visions, fusing flesh and machine, and for designing the creature in the film Alien.
Flesh fused with machine
Giger called his style biomechanical: bodies merged with tubes, bones and engines, sexual and mechanical at the same time, all in cold greys and blacks.
His airbrushed worlds, smooth and seamless, belong to the dark end of Surrealism, picturing the unconscious as a vast living machine.
The airbrush
He worked mainly with the airbrush, building soft, photographic gradients that make his metal and flesh look disturbingly real.
The technique, related to the spray of acrylic painting, let him render textures with no visible brushwork, which is part of why the images feel so airless and strange.
The creature that changed cinema
In 1979 the director Ridley Scott based the monster of Alien directly on Giger paintings, and Giger built the design for the film.
The work won him an Academy Award and changed science fiction film forever, giving the genre a new vision of horror as something sleek, sexual and organic.
The total environment
Giger dreamed of total environments. He designed furniture, album covers and bars where every surface dripped with his biomechanical forms.
A museum of his work and one of his eerie themed bars still stand in Switzerland, letting visitors step bodily inside the world he imagined.
What people ask about HR Giger
What is he known for?
Dark biomechanical art and designing the creature in Alien.
What does biomechanical mean?
A fusion of living bodies and machines.
Did he win awards?
Yes, an Academy Award for the visual design of Alien.
When did he die?
In 2014.
Why the nightmares endure
Giger gave shape to a fear most people cannot name, the dread of bodies and machines becoming one, and once seen his creature could not be unseen. Decades on, his Alien still haunts cinema, the rare case of a single painter design becoming one of the most famous monsters in the world.
Long before the film, his book of paintings called Necronomicon was what caught Ridley Scott eye and led to the commission, so an art book launched a movie monster. His themed bars, with their ribbed, skeletal ceilings, were built so carefully that drinking inside one feels like sitting in the belly of one of his creatures. He had studied industrial design before turning to art, which is partly why his fusions of body and machine feel so convincingly engineered rather than merely imagined. His influence runs far beyond cinema into music, tattoo culture and video games, so that an entire visual language of sleek biological horror traces back to one Swiss painter at his airbrush. A whole museum devoted to his work opened in a medieval castle in Switzerland, where visitors can walk through rooms of his paintings and sculptures as if entering the dream itself. He also designed sets and creatures for other films and music videos, and his haunting bars, with their ribbed skeletal ceilings, were built so that drinking inside one feels like sitting in the belly of one of his creatures. Generations of effects artists and sculptors now name him as the reason they entered the field.