Goodbye to Hans Rudolf Giger 1940 - 2014.

I was obsessed with 'Alien' long before I ever saw a frame of it.

The first encounter for me was in the newsagents concession of a supermarket. Imagine a little boy browsing anything that had Star Wars on the cover. My memory doesn't recall exactly which magazine I picked up (I suspect it was the impossibly-beyond-the-reach-of-my-pocket money 'Starlog) but this is the image that jolted me there and then:

I couldn't make sense of it. Was that the doctor guy's hand? Was he trying to drill into someone's head with his other hand? What was wrong with his weird hand? Oh, maybe it's not his hand. Is that some guy's face? What is this? Something called 'Alien'. Wow.

I was into monsters anyway, but the thought of a film about an alien monster on a spaceship was just too exciting to comprehend. I was still several years off being allowed to see an X rater and this was also in the pre-video era. There was no chance I was ever going to see it so I had to make do with reading about it.

See this poster here:

I had (still have) the Alan dean Foster novelisation, The Photonovel (they were the new thing then) and the comic novelisation. Maybe a bit weird to be obsessional about it before I'd even seen it but there you are.

So it's safe to say that I knew the story before I saw the film, but even so, when I did finally see it, I was still unprepared for the full visceral impact of it. It turned up surprisingly quickly on terrestrial television (in those days you generally had to wait five years before any new film would get a broadcast) and I guess I saw it sometime in 1982. For some reason that I can't quite figure out, I know that the house was empty and I know that I saw it on my own. That first viewing was terrifying but electrifying, as only the films encountered in those formative years can be. Knowing what would happen didn't diminish any of the power for me. Lord only knows how I would have reacted if I'd gone in blind.

It won't surprise you therefore that 'Alien' is still one of the fixed constants in my all time top ten films. 'Assault On Precinct 13' and 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' are another two. Everything else is in flux and up for debate.

Anyway, all of this is just setting context for saying what a big deal it is that H.R. Giger has died today. He was a true artist whose work was instantly recognisable. There are few precursors to his dark imagination and he was impossible to imitate without it coming off as blatant plagiarism. He turned subconscious fears into biomechanical flesh; fusing death, sex and horror into an unsettling brew.  I'd like to thank Ridley Scott for interpreting his work for the big screen and I'd like to thank H.R. Giger for dragging horror and sci-fi into new realms and for being the perverted, uncompromising wonder that he was.