Giger's Alien Art

Alien was gradually moving toward its shooting schedule and there was still no acceptable monster. One sketch proposal looked sort of like an octopus, another like a small dinosaur. One artist brought in a model that looked like a Christmas turkey. O'Bannon always had Giger in the back of his mind. He paid a visit to Ridley Scott.

"Dan came in," Scott recalls, "with this book I'd never seen before, opened it up and said, 'What do you think of this?' I looked down and saw this stunning picture...this remarkable drawing. I think it's one of the best Giger has ever done. I have never been so sure of something in all my life." What Scott saw was a picture from a Giger collection called Giger's Necronomicon, a picture that might best be described as the Alien's second cousin. "And I said to Dan,'Well, either my problems are over or they've just begun.'"

"I've never liked horror films before, because in the end it's always been a man in a rubber suit. Well, there's one way to deal with that. The most important thing in a film of this type is not what you see, but the effect of what you think you saw." - Ridley Scott

He didn't need to worry. Giger did a remarkable job, designing the Alien in its three phases as well as the surface of the alien planet, the derelict craft, and the dead space jocky. And when he sculpted and crafted the final Alien costume, it was, when photographed, the furthest thing from what Scott dreaded: "A man in a rubber suit."

So it had been decided that the eponymous Alien and its accompanying elements would be designed by Swiss surrealist artist H. R. Giger, while concept artists Ron Cobb and Chris Foss would design the human aspects of the film. To make sure he and Giger were on the same page, Scott explained the three forms of the Alien: "I would have loved to have had a third dimension on the creature, including the fact that there was a civilization and that maybe the derelict ship was a battlewagon, or a freighter that was carrying either its own kind or a weapon from A to B, and something went wrong. But without that, you still have to put perspective on the danger of the thing, like showing that even its reproduction is frightening.

"I want to show that the Alien has a limited life cycle, like a butterfly," said Scott. "And within that period of time, once it decides to expose itself—to coin a phrase—once it jumps out of the egg, it has to reproduce and spread as fast as possible, maybe in a cycle of only days. And so in the last sequence, you see slime emanating from the Big Alien's body because we're trying to convey that maybe he's sealing himself in again, like in a cocoon. Also, by that point, he has to be provoked to attack, because he has to get on with his life cycle."

Dan O'Bannon, shared an insight on Alien psychopathology: "The whole idea is that they have a very complicated life cycle. They have a spore that contains what amounts to an ambulatory penis, and they require a host to reproduce. And when a host approaches the spore, this thing springs out and attaches itself to the host and deposits eggs in the nearest available orifice and then it dies and falls off. The host is just an incubator for the thing that will ultimately emerge. And it grows to maturity with incredible speed, it's tremendously hungry, and it has a need to reproduce."

"But the creature that pops out onboard the spaceship has never been subject to its own culture; it's never been subject to anything at all except a few hours in the hold of a ship. And therefore, quite literally, it doesn't have an education. The Alien is not only savage, it's also ignorant."

"The Alien is the star of the movie." -H.R. Giger

"I don't think he dares take off those clothes, because if he did you'd see that underneath he's not human. He's a character from an H.P. Lovecraft story."

"Work for a film is different because I know what I have to do, but I also try to be completely free and let myself go. I had a lot of freedom on Alien because Ridley Scott and I would discuss the story, and sometimes use my book as a guide, and then I knew where I had to go."

The original design called for a much bigger Hugger, which used a large, muscular tail to spring out of the egg like a jack-in-the-box, but Scott wanted something smaller, more face-sized. "Now," says Giger, "we have this creature who looks a little bit like a spider with a tail. His body is very small and the biggest things are the two hands and a tail. The hands hold onto Kane's face, and the tail wraps around his neck." The Face Hugger would eventually fall off and die and Kane would appear to recover...but only long enough to become the center­piece of what could be one of the most horrifying scenes ever filmed. The crew, including a revived and hungry Kane, are having a last meal before returning to their hypersleep vaults. There is a lot of amiable chatter. Suddenly Kane groans and pitches forward onto the table. He rolls over and a blossom of blood appears on his white T- shirt.

"On the day we shot that scene," says special effects man Nick Allder, "everyone was very nervous, especially the actors. The crew were all wearing white smocks, and it made the set look like an operating theater. Also, the set was very, very tight. You see John Hurt's head and real arms on top of the table, and a very shallow chest piece in front of him where the little Chest Burster comes out. Roger Dicken and I used a series of hydraulic rams to make him work.

Scott chose not to show the Alien in full through most of the film, showing only pieces of it while keeping most of its body in shadow in order to heighten the sense of terror and suspense. The audience could thus project their own fears into imagining what the rest of the creature might look like: "Every movement is going to be very slow, very graceful, and the Alien will alter shape so you never really know exactly what he looks like." The Alien has been referred to as "one of the most iconic movie monsters in film history" in the decades since the film's release, being noted for its biomechanical appearance and sexual overtones. Roger Ebert has remarked that "Alien uses a tricky device to keep the alien fresh throughout the movie: It evolves the nature and appearance of the creature, so we never know quite what it looks like or what it can do."

Of course, as Giger is fond of pointing out, the Big Alien is the star of the movie. And once the producers were satisfied with the Alien concept, they had to find a big human to satisfy the concept's requirements."Well," says producer Gordon Carroll, "we couldn't figure out who was going to be inside the suit. We interviewed karate champions, a mime artist...we even considered one of those tall, skinny fashion models. Then we got a call from an agent here in London, and we went to meet him and someone he had told us about. So we were sitting in the pub and this man came through the door practically on his hands and knees. When he straight­ened up he was seven-foot-two. And the agent looked at us, looked at him, and said: 'How would you like to be a movie star?'"

"As I do with all my work, I made the creature look biomechanical," Giger says. "Starting with the plaster core, I worked with Plasticine, rub­ber, bones, ribbed tubes, and different mechanical stuff like wires. The whole costume is translucent; the head is fiberglass. It also had to be flexi­ble because he had to pose in various ways and sometimes jump very quickly, like an insect."

There was another head and torso for close-ups, one that the special effects people were justly proud of. "That head will do literally anything," says Allder. "It will snarl, it will smile, it will bear its teeth like a dog, open its mouth and stick out its tongue—which also has a mouth with teeth that opens—and it will breathe in the throat." All this was accomplished, again, by a complicated series of hydraulic rams run from a control box."

"Every movement is going to be very slow, very graceful, and the Alien will alter shape so you never really know exactly what he looks like." - Ridley Scott

One weekend, four visitors from the States were invited to look in on post-production proceedings at Bray Studios. The remaining crew was still putting in seven-day weeks as the film began to take final shape. On one stage, Nick Allder and his special effects crew were filming the Nostromo in flight. An impressive twelve-foot model— rife with detail—was suspended from the ceiling by a web of chains and pulleys. (In miniature shots, it's actually the camera that does the moving.) In another, smaller room, Ridley Scott, surrounded by a dozen technicians, was peering through his camera lens into the uncomfortably close face of a drooling Alien, shooting more close-ups. There wasn't much talk.

Earlier that day, the visitors, carrying beer and sandwiches to appease their jet-lagged stomachs, were ushered into a screening room and allowed to see a rough cut of Alien. It was actually more of an assemblage than a rough cut. There were no titles and no sound effects. The score had not yet been written, but a substitute amalgam of music had been tacked on for mood. There were a lot of frames that said Scene Missing. The rhythm and pacing was distorted because there was still much editing to be done—inserts and pick-up shots to be completed.

But as the film was being shown, these things happened:

• • One visitor choked on his beer.

  • Another knocked over a plate of sandwiches when he lurched violently in his chair.

  • Yet another, who has viewed practically every science fiction and horror movie ever made, was seen to be peering through his fingers, which were often covering his face.

The lights came on and the visitors turned to look at Gordon Carroll. "Well," he said with a trace of a smile, "what do you think?"