H. R. Giger was a Swiss painter and designer, born in Chur in 1940, who died in Zurich in 2014. He created the monster in Ridley Scott's film Alien and shared the Academy Award for its visual effects in 1980. Long before and long after that film, he airbrushed bodies fused with machinery, a world known as biomechanical, and in Gruyères he left a castle museum and a bar built inside his own imagery.
Most people meet him through one creature. The odd part is that the creature was not invented for the film.
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The monster that won the Oscar was already on a wall in Zurich. In 1976 Giger had painted a picture called Necronom IV, an armored, long-headed figure with a snarling mouth, for no film and no client. A year later he gathered his paintings in a book, Necronomicon.
The screenwriter Dan O'Bannon, who had worked with Giger on a film that was never made, put that book in front of Ridley Scott. Scott chose the painting as the basis of his creature. The studio, Fox, feared that Giger's art would disturb audiences too much. Giger offered to design the monster from scratch, and Scott refused, because starting over would take too long.
So the most feared face in science fiction came out of a private nightmare. Giger suffered night terrors, and he said he painted to exorcise the visions.
What You'll Discover
What a boy saw in a Chur museum.
What a spray gun did to his paintings.
Whose face is on that record sleeve.
What a film that never existed gave him.
What he took away from the monster's face.