Necronomicon !!!

Since 1979 I have been fascinated with H.R. Giger. I was 17 at the time and my best friend Mitchell asked me to travel with him to England to see what was going to be the greatest Rock Concert Ever as far as we were both concerned. The show would be held in a huge park and smack dab in the middle of a lovely little British sleepy town called "Knebworth". I couldn't make it. Too much family stuff going on at the time including a trip with my father to New York City to see a TOY SHOW for his company at the time...IRWIN TOY. The Irwins{2 brothers ran it} had a habbit of buying up all the smaller toy companys like "Hasbro" and "Ideal" and eventually "Atari". During this particular toy show, my father explained that they, with his blessing and encouragement, had bought the rights to ONE TOY for a new movie they both claimed was going to become a sensation inside of the next 2-6 weeks. He then handed me the world's first TOY XENOMORPH. For as long as I live I will never forget what happened in that Hotel Showroom next... My father yanked something out of the Dolls mouth and to my utter STUPER it was another one...a complete other mouth, with a new sleeker jaw and new , all be it Evil looking set of teeth. I freaked...and at that moment my Father said these words... "This is going to be Huge". To this day I do not think even he realised just how right he was, and how "HUGE" it was going to become. So my best friend MItchell gets back from Knebworth knowing I missed the show of a lifetime, but that LED ZEPPELIN was such a household brand by then, I would surely get another chance. Needless to say, I never did. But something cool, real cool, came out of it all the same. Micthell had stayed in London for a month after the show in Knebworth, and on his way home he found and purchased a Bootleg Album copy of the show there, and gave it to me the night he got home. Months later, I had another shock, one that set my own Jaw all the way down to my lap, when I realised that the Incredible ArtWork on the front and back covers of Led Zeppelin's Knebworth Bootleg album where designed and created by none other than H.R. Giger and that this same guy was the guy who designed and created the first drawings which became the proto-type doll and STAR for the film "ALIEN" and the doll that now sat on a shelf back in my little quiet room in our house in the suburbs. When I heard that the very first thing Ridley Scott did upon being green lighted for "Prometheus", the very first thing, was INSIST on GIGER. I was overjoyed. It was the ONLY way this could work and more importantly it is JUSTICE for Giger, whom, at the time, was treated very very poorly from the way I understand the facts about both the studios in Great Britian and in the U.S.A. as well as Mr. Fyncher, and every other executive involved in the making of Alien 3. He was never even given credit for designing the creatures, all of them , including those used in Alien 3 to begin with. And he was heartbroken and furious. In fact, his name was never even mentioned when anyone talked of the film and almost all of the artwork in it was designed by or pulled from designs made by him alone. So this time, I figured I would dig a little deeper into his life and was amazed at what I was able to find. The single most incredible thing I discovered was something I assume most if not all of you already knew but I did not. During the filming of the film "ALIEN", that is, for every single minute of it's shooting, for all of it's production meetings, for all of it's editing sessions, Ridely Scott clutched one object to his chest and never let it go. It was with him for every single minute of production work on the film and is now one of those highly respected but quirky film facts...it was the BIBLE for the ALIEN franchise, and everything Ridley envisioned and then filmed came out of and was born of this one thing... "Necronomicon" !!! [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/Necronom1.jpg[/img] "It is Giger's paintings which are his true gift to the world of the imagination: the creations which the Alien films for their power to excite can but wanly imitate. To simply characterise Giger as 'the artist of Alien' is like calling Michelangelo the set designer for the Agony and the Ecstasy. "The images Giger has created have a power that demands closer and more reflective study than the sleek, slick hyperactive style of modern fantastic cinema allows. Without such close scrutiny the ambiguities at the heart of the work remain unexplored : the creatures he paints are reduced to the point where all they elicit is disgust. "I ask you, look again. Though we come into Giger's world astonished and intimidated by its strangeness, it does not take long to learn its codes and its iconography... and the more familiar we become with the landscape and its inhabitants the more familiar it seems. Like all great visionaries, Giger has no truck with superfice; he plunges his hands into the raw stuff of our subconscious, and using methodologies that are unique to him creates a state that is rigourous, hierarchical and, for all its abysmal depths, inviting." *H.R.Giger's Necronomicon Introduction by Barker, 1992 (lengthy extract republished in Aliens, Vol 2 No 21, March 1994 as Mapping The Psyche). I have in examining GIGER found some pretty incredible stuff out there, including a DVD with most of his most recognized images put into motion and set to a slide show with some pretty erie background music that conjures up films such as "Nosferatu" or even "Faust". None though I think as legendary now as "Necronomocon" !!!