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Spartacus
MemberOvomorph10/10/2011Since 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" !!!
14 Replies

Rick
MemberXenomorph10/10/2011If you love Necronomicon. Download Google Earth and look up Musee HR Giger, Guyeres, Switzerland and you can see the layout of his Bar with "Delicious Alien Coffee"
Maybe we could convince Ghostface to market a "Prometheus-Movie" Sanctioned Expedition to Guyere's, Switzerland to check out Gigers Museum and we all meet at Giger's Bar for Alien Coffee.

Chris
AdminEngineer10/10/2011I think that sounds like a great idea Rick! ;)
Predator: Badlands - coming November 7th, 2025

Guest
MemberOvomorph10/11/2011Nice post Spartacus, I think you mean that new 'H.R.Giger Revealed' dvd with the
moving images don't you? The 'Erotovisions' are phenomenal. You're right about how
the later films (with the exception of the creature in #3 - that was an exquisite design)dumbed down the Alien form rendering it so far removed from the Necronomicon imagery as to make it look like an oily, swimming blind dinosaur.
As you infer, this was because of stupid Hollywood money-mentality, wrong choices for concept design and general art department and lack of artistic execution while making the later films. I really hope to God this Tom Rothman fella levels well with Scott's vision and comes to a hair's breadth compromise for the rating - never mind the blu-ray version, the long-awaited, definitive filmic Giger phantasms and there attendant shock value should be rightly experienced at the cinema.

Neurion
Veteran MemberMemberOvomorph10/11/2011I’m up for that Rick!
Leave all this Ameri-trash for a couple of weeks. I’ll be packin’ my big-ass Swiss Army knife, my Swiss watch, my Swiss backpack, my Swiss Family Robinson DVD, and even my Swiss cheese. I’m ready to bust out some home grown, Swiss Absinthe, so that when we meet H.R. Puff ‘n Stuff…the Gigster himself…we’ll be seein’ the same shite he paints.
La Fee Verte…AKA the "Green Fairy," can give us the grand tour of his museum of Whores…I mean Horrors. Hell yeah I'm up for that!
I'd love to meet that scary ol' bastard...before he goes to Hell...or where ever he's headed. Plus, I'd enjoy meeting you and a few of my other pen pals from this site.
Aufrichtig,
~Neurion

Spartacus
MemberOvomorph10/11/2011
Member
Posts: 85
Neurion ›
Posted 10/11/2011
I’m up for that Rick!
Leave all this Ameri-trash for a couple of weeks. I’ll be packin’ my big-ass Swiss Army knife, my Swiss watch, my Swiss backpack, my Swiss Family Robinson DVD, and even my Swiss cheese. I’m ready to bust out some home grown, Swiss Absinthe, so that when we meet H.R. Puff ‘n Stuff…the Gigster himself…we’ll be seein’ the same shite he paints.
La Fee Verte…AKA the "Green Fairy," can give us the grand tour of his museum of Whores…I mean Horrors. Hell yeah I'm up for that!
I'd love to meet that scary ol' bastard...before he goes to Hell...or where ever he's headed. Plus, I'd enjoy meeting you and a few of my other pen pals from this site.
Aufrichtig,
~Neurion
another in an absolute and seemingly unending chain of some of the best and most entertaining POSTS I have ever read on any Alien related subject matter.
Damn that's some funny stuff Neurion...
IMO, you're right up there with Giger himself on the "Unique" scale.
and maybe some other scales I don't even know about yet.
LMFAO!

ZetaReticuli
MemberOvomorph10/12/2011Oh yes, hopefully, at long last, there may be a second film that depicts
the world of Giger's 'Necronomicon' so unabashedly and without restraint.
The first simply being 'Alien'. Why has this man been so criminally overlooked ,
mis-represented and generally let down by the film-making community since
Alien?
In a perverse and contradictory way, I'm glad this is the case, because it only serves
to accentuate further the strange peripheral world he creates and the 'exclusivity'
of his legions of adoring fans. Vive le roi - H.R.Giger.....

Spartacus
MemberOvomorph10/12/2011& THE FILM "DUNE" !
Most of the great images in that film...
were all GIGER as well.

Spartacus
MemberOvomorph01/12/2012a lot of people here need to read this book and need to understand what ridley scott and h r giger intended with Alien
because RAPE !!!
both MALE FEMALE AND ALIEN RAPE
IS EXACTLY WHAT HE/THEY WANTED !!!

Spartacus
MemberOvomorph01/12/2012so this book, that Scott carried around on his person on the set the entire time he was making Alien was his Bible and had mainly very little else but Gigers Paintings in it !!!

Spartacus
MemberOvomorphJun-02-2012 2:38 PMfrom anyone who has seen the film did you notice any more GIGER influences in it?
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