When Alien hit theaters in 1979, the monster on screen was unlike anything moviegoers had ever seen. The film's deadly, parasitic Xenomorph was terrifying and grotesque, yet graceful and stunning. “I always wanted my alien to be a very beautiful thing, something aesthetic," production designer H.R. Giger has said of his creation. "A monster isn’t just something disgusting; it can have a kind of beauty.”

Giger, a Swiss artist known as much for his darkly surreal paintings as for his cinematic work, is the subject of a new video essay that explores how his background in design informed not just the appearance of Alien's titular interstellar stowaway, but the look, feel, and pacing of the film, itself. The video, made by Kristian Williams, is a reminder of just how brilliant Giger’s Academy Award-winning design work was, and still is.

As Williams explains it, director Ridley Scott came across Giger’s Necronomicon, Giger's first book dedicated to his macabre, biomechanical aesthetic, while trying to conceptualize what the film’s monster should look like. An illustration titled Necronom #4, depicting a sinuous creature with an elongated head, so affected Scott that he asked Giger to alter his original design only slightly.

Giger wound up working on the film’s entire production design. “Down the line I realized it made a lot of sense for Giger to design everything that was to do with the alien,” Ridley recalls in the video. “That includes the landscape and the spacecraft.” Giger’s morbid biology-meets-industrial touch can be see everywhere in LV426, but his alien was the showstopper.

Williams says that Giger himself fabricated the costumes, which made good use of his industrial design background. Every piece of the costume was considered, from the mouth-breathing apparatus on its back to the fact that its acidic blood required an acid-resistant exoskeleton (fun fact: the costume incorporated real bones, human and animal). Giger built the xenomorph’s lips from condoms, and nestled a real human skull into the tip of the alien’s cylindrical head. As the video points out, Giger’s aesthetic has become so acknowledged it has its own adjective “Gigeresque.”

In a time where monsters are the result of clicking around on a computer, it's no wonder we're still in awe of Giger's wildly creative alien. Like all movie monsters, it's a product of an artist's imagination, but it's a whole lot scarier when you can actually reach out and touch it.