H. R. Giger was a Swiss painter and designer, born in Chur in 1940, who died in Zurich in 2014. He created the monster of Ridley Scott's film Alien and shared the Academy Award for its visual effects in 1980.
Long before that film and long after it, he airbrushed bodies fused with machinery, a world known as biomechanical.
In Gruyères, a medieval hilltop town in western Switzerland, he left a castle turned into a museum and a bar built inside his own imagery.
One creature made his name, yet it 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 it for no film and no client, in a picture called Necronom IV: an armored figure with a snarling mouth and a skull stretched back into a long, curved tube.
A year later he gathered his paintings in a book, Necronomicon, and the picture went into it. The book reached Ridley Scott through the screenwriter of Alien, Dan O'Bannon, who had met Giger on a science fiction film that was never made, an adaptation of the novel Dune.
Scott saw Necronom IV in its pages and chose it as the basis of his creature. The studio, Twentieth Century Fox, feared that an image so morbid and so openly sexual would disturb audiences too much. Giger offered to design a monster from scratch, and Scott refused, because starting over would take too long.
Behind the painting were Giger's own nights. He suffered night terrors, and he said he painted to exorcise the visions. One of his strongest memories of dread and wonder went back to the age of eight, to a room in a museum of Chur, his home town.
A boy in Chur
Chur, the capital of the canton of Graubünden, is a small town in the Swiss Alps. Giger was born there in February 1940, and his father had already chosen a trade for him, one that had nothing to do with painting.
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.