Forty-seven years after it first burst into our nightmares, H. R. Giger’s Alien still looks icky and sleek, and somehow freshly unearthed. Not designed so much as woken up.
Buy Giger’s AlienTitan Books’ handsome new reissue of Giger’s Alien may be as close as we’ll ever get to a you-are-there account of the monster’s birth. Originally published in 1979, this slim hardcover combines Giger’s production diary with paintings, photographs, and sketches. We watch the nightmare take shape—from Facehugger to Chestburster to the full-grown creature stalking the corridors of the Nostromo.
The pictures are magnificent. But the best thing in the book is Giger himself.
The artist who emerges from the diary isn’t just some weird, misunderstood European creep-genius. He’s a hardworking, sometimes rattled guy trying to survive a movie production. Budgets tighten. Egos collide and schedules shift. Designs get questioned. Things have to be rebuilt. Somebody—always—wants something changed.
And there’s Giger, a newcomer to Hollywood filmmaking, making it clear he doesn’t enjoy all of it.
That candor makes the book unexpectedly suspenseful. We know how this turns out. Alien becomes a classic. The creature becomes iconic. Giger and the film’s visual-effects team win an Oscar. But the man writing this diary knows none of that. He only knows the problems staring him down each day.
That’s how Giger’s Alien becomes more than just an art book. It captures what making something great can look like before history has rendered its judgment: the arguments, the compromises, the headaches. The nagging doubt that maybe none of this will work.
Clive Barker once described Giger as a fellow traveler through darkness who looked into the abyss and came back with proof. This book sidesteps the Giger myth. Instead, it gives us Giger the man, trying to get his vision on film while around him a large, complicated production grinds away.
Titan’s 78-page edition, roughly a foot square and slick to the touch, is a beauty. Yes, it’s an art object, but it’s also something more intimate. It’s a portrait of an artist caught in the messy act of birthing the thing that will outlive him.
Alien heads will eat it up. So, I suspect, will creatives fascinated by the day-to-day struggle of trying to make something difficult right.
Turns out the creative process can be a mean old monstrous bitch, too.
Who woulda thunk?
