Six Damn Fine Degrees #187: The Alien in the High Castle

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness.

Inspired by Alan’s Scavengers Reign review in last week’s post, and his observation that the series looks as if Swiss Alien designer HR Giger had joined Studio Ghibli in the 1980s, I decided to follow the trail that Giger left behind since his untimely death ten years ago in his and my home country. It quickly turned out that the mothership of his creations these days is, fittingly, a museum in eerie Medieval castle St. Germain high on top of Gruyères, home of one of Switzerland’s most famous cheeses.

Giger wasn’t born there but in the east of Switzerland in 1940, and he received his artistic training mostly in the Applied Arts school of Zurich. It was his studies of interior architecture and industrial design together with his interest in fantastic realism that led to the futuristic and frightening paintings and sculptures he crafted from the 1960s onwards. When Castle St. Germain became available in the late 1990s, it proved to be an ideal spot to display the large collection of his own art and artists that influenced him within the gallery of winding staircases and creaky-floored rooms, nooks and crannies of the castle. Since 2003, an adjoining bar with fittingly vaulted, spine-like ceilings has completed the Giger experience, which is attracting healthy numbers of international visitors.

By the 1970s, Giger’s art was not only admired by LSD guru Timothy Leary but also frightened the living daylights out of a certain Californian film student by the name of Dan O’Bannon, who was looking to make an alien film that would be truly disturbing: “His paintings had a profound effect on me. I had never seen anything that was quite as horrible and at the same time as beautiful as his work. And so I ended up writing a script about a Giger monster.” When Giger’s first international film project fell through (Jodorowsky’s epic adaptation of Dune, no less), O’Bannon sought him out to help him conceptualise Alien – from the strange planet encountered by the Nostromo crew to the cocoon birth of the monsters, including all the face-hugging and chest-busting details. Most famously, of course, it’s Giger’s design of the Alien itself that contributed to him and the visual effects crew picking up their Oscars the following year.

Entering the museum at Château St. Germain, one certainly gets a fair share of material designed for and from the movie, and I found myself surprised by how much of Giger’s vision is actually on display in the set and creature design. Walking past his early art, I was also struck by how consistent his imagery had been from the start: the large air-brushed tryptichs certainly contain the same mix of female shapes and organic machinery as Alien displays. There are original sketches for the unforgettable face-hugging horror, as well as for the alien spaceship in all nauseating detail. And there, on top of it all, are the creature designs and sculptures for the Alien itself. Let’s not forget the original Oscar statuette, shared with four other visual design people – which some argue was rather a curse for Giger, who found himself shunned from any serious art fair afterwards.

His fame grew in the filmmaking community, however, and despite not being asked back to design James Cameron’s sequel Aliens or continue his work on Dune for the David Lynch adapatation (even though his Harkonnen chairs rank among the treasures at the museum), he did contribute a demonic dimension to Poltergeist II, Species and Alien 3, where David Fincher gave him much more leeway for his designs than Ridley Scott had. Species maybe gave Giger his biggest opportunity to prove his unique vision in a slightly different science fiction world, even if the film and especially its sequel never reached the quality of the Alien franchise. Two years before his death from the aftereffects of a fall, Giger was again asked to contribute to its next installment, Prometheus, partly using original designs from the ‘70s.

The visitor is left with mixed feelings, however, not only because of the unused potential of Giger’s talents, but also the lack of further information on him and his artistic process. Most displays don’t contain more than basic information and aren’t put in further context. Visitors are somehow left to their own (googling) devices to piece together the puzzle of his career, design style and influences. Some more in-depth text panels would have immensely helped to better structure a visit. There is a particularly interesting collection of film designs on display, including sketches, paintings and models. Upstairs, in the castle’s attic, Giger’s own private collection of modern art shows the many influences he used and had on others. The view over Gruyères from here is truly charming, the impressions of the exhibits somewhat of a random assembly of interesting parts.

Maybe this mirrors Giger’s creative process itself: putting together disparaging pieces of the organic, the sensual, the nightmarish and the industrial into one unique vision. The aliens (and the legacy of their creator) on this high castle are certainly worth a visit, and with new installments in the franchise in the making (Alien: Romulus coming out this year), one can hope that Giger’s work will continue to stir interest for the collection shown here and not let dust settle on it too quickly.