Alien nightmare: how HR Giger’s iconic creature was brought to life “We shouldn’t call him a monster,” Ridley Scott once said, of the terrifying creature in Alien. “He’s better than that.” […]

“We shouldn’t call him a monster,” Ridley Scott once said, of the terrifying creature in Alien.

“He’s better than that.”

Scott’s 1979 masterpiece of science fiction and horror is memorable for many reasons. But the nightmarish creature which stalks the film’s cast may be the most vital.

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Constructing the alien and bringing it to life, however, proved easier said than done.

It was an ordeal that would involve everything from a seven-foot tall actor to a small mountain of condoms.

Giger’s bio-mechanical dreams

In order for his film to work, Scott needed a truly unique and terrifying creature. The script even refers to it as a “perfect organism”.

So how to create such a presence on screen?

Enter surrealist Swiss artist HR Giger.

It was co-writer Dan O’Bannon who brought Giger onto the production, after previously encountering him on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s doomed Dune project.

Giger’s disturbing, outlandish imagery appealed to Scott and his team – and he was enlisted to provide designs for various sets, as well as the creature itself.

Breaking monster conventions “We started with the idea that the monster would have no scales, no fangs, no claws,” explained one of the producers, David Giler. “It’s got to be something completely different.”

As revealed in 1979 documentary ‘Giger’s Alien’, the artist’s ambition was to create “an elegant insectoid being which has nothing in common with the usual clumsy film monsters”.

He duly set to work sketching ideas.

“They all emerged out of my personal visual world, which I call bio-mechanical,” Giger said.

“We came to the conclusion that a creature without eyes, driven by instinct alone, would be far more frightening. That’s why I painted a second version of the alien that has no eyes.”

A nightmarish process

The concept had been agreed. But actually making the alien, which would later become known as the xenomorph in 1986 sequel Aliens, was another thing altogether.

“It’s a lot easier to put down a fantasy in a painting than to translate such a creation into a costume that could be worn by a man,” Giger mused.

At times, Giger said, the construction process was “a nightmare”.

The original head, a mix of plasticine, technical parts and a skull, came under intense scrutiny.

After solving technical issues, a rubber mould of the alien head was created.

In the ‘Monster Making Department’, as it was dubbed, technicians placed layer upon layer of latex rubber into moulds, day after day.

The physical form started to come together. Giger decided that, as well as a toothed tongue, the alien should have a tail it could use as a weapon. He used an animal vertebrae for this.

Tubes from an old Rolls-Royce were also used in the body. The alien was becoming literally bio-mechanical – something which must have delighted Giger.

Condoms played a surprising role too.

For the facial-muscular parts of the monster, which had to perform real movements, rubber contraceptives were utilised.

The ‘chest-burster’ The infant Alien that emerged from John Hurt was partly inspired by a Francis Bacon painting, which Scott brought to Giger’s attention. It depicted a largely formless, fleshy being with prominent teeth. Giger said his original designs looked like “chickens without feathers”. Unhappy, he then created something like a “small dinosaur”, which again failed to excite. He then removed the legs, leaving just the head and tail. This proved much more effective.

Engineering the infamous tongue

Carlo Rambaldi, the Italian special effects artist who had previously won an Oscar for his work on King Kong, was brought in to give life to the alien.

Rambaldi built the head, which had 900 separate moving parts. Facial movements were controlled by hand, via wires.

Scott had a few problems with the initial face construct. Some springs were visible. There were too many details.

So Rambaldi set about refining it. In particular, his mechanical system for the infamous ‘stabbing’ tongue was ingeniously engineered.

When the alien was eventually completed, it became something of an attraction at the movie’s workshop. Friends and families of the effects crew flocked to see it.

Finally, Giger’s imagined creature had become a reality.

But they needed someone to inhabit it.

The man in the suit

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that the face-hugger in the egg was just Scott’s hands in a pair of rubber gloves, the grown alien itself was a very practical creation.

In classic B-movie fashion, it was a literal man in a suit.

Originally Scott tried using circus performers to play the alien. He even attempted to have two or three working the costume together.

“It was always a little ridiculous,” recalls Giger, in 2003 documentary ‘The Beast Within’. “It wasn’t scary. So we decided it was scary to make it closer to a human being.”

In the same documentary, Scott explained his dilemma.

“[The suit needed to be] as thin as a contraceptive but as strong as nylon. Because then I can crush this person into the suit and still have all kinds of things stitched into it.

“I needed someone extraordinarily thin.”

As luck would have it, they found just the man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFpgu1L1YIc

Bolaji Badejo was an unusually tall Nigerian graphic designer, spotted in a London pub by the film’s casting director.

The seven-foot tall Badejo joined the production soon after; tasked with giving the creature an eerie, creeping aspect.

He was sent to tai chi and mime classes to learn how to slow and control his movements.

The end result was extraordinary. Badejo is something of an unsung hero of the movie, and played a big part in the Alien’s effectiveness on screen.

He suffered for his art, though.

Cast and crew recall that Badejo couldn’t sit down due to his costume’s tail, so had a special swing designed for him to rest in. He wore the restrictive costume all day while filming.

Interestingly, and perhaps ingeniously, Scott also deliberately kept him away from the rest of the cast, so they would be more scared when he was filming with them on set.

Gymnasts and jelly A gymnast was used for the scene in which Harry Dean Stanton is snatched by the creature from above. KY Jelly was also used to create a slime effect on the alien’s exterior.

Less is more

Despite going to all this trouble, it is notable that the grown alien is only truly visible in several key scenes. And even then, it is mostly glimpsed briefly.

When Rambaldi asked Scott why he was filming so little of the creature they had built, Scott explained his ‘less is more’ approach.

Scott reasoned that rare, brief glimpses of the creature heightened the suspense – and made the alien appear that much more mysterious and intangible.

“I always felt… only see the bits you want to see,” explained Scott.

“If you think you’ve seen something, it’s always going to be more horrific. I think you get enough.”

The Alien creature’s impact and legacy

Alien won HR Giger an Oscar for his work.

Today his painstaking creation remains, arguably, cinema’s most enduring and distinctive beast.

Scott described the creature as “primal, frightening and realistic”

“Giger’s design was ground-breaking in that it was so different from the mainstream,” says Mike Kelt, CEO of British special effects company Artem.

“It opened up future possibilities.

“The most effective element of the design I think was the head. The move away from a normal skull, combined with the mechanical echos where the mouth telescoped out, and of course the use of ‘slime’ instantly made the audience recoil.

“Showing the creature’s internal organs as some sort of bio-mechanical structure was pretty ground-breaking: turning the design ‘inside-out’ as it were.”

Giger, for his part, was justly proud of his creation. And fiercely protective of it too.

When the artist failed to receive a credit in the 1997 film Alien Resurrection, he wrote an angry letter to Fox:

As for those responsible for this conspiracy: all I can wish them is an Alien breeding inside their chests, which might just remind them that the ‘Alien Father’ is H.R.Giger. H.R.Giger.

Giger was indeed the father of the alien.

When the artist died in 2014 following a fall, obituaries around the world led near unanimously with his work on the film.

That’s hardly surprising. Few movies feature such audacious and disturbing creativity.

Alien: Covenant, directed by Ridley Scott, is released in UK cinemas on Friday 12 May