ACCORDING TO HIS mother-in-law, H.R. Giger was just “a normal guy”. He liked cake, he enjoyed The Wire, and he loved cats. He would drop what he was doing to blow kisses at his beloved Siamese cat, Müggi III, and ask him how his day was. Every day, Müggi III used a cat-flap Giger had made in the shape of a cat, with cat ears cut into the door panel. Pinned up around Giger’s home office were photos of every cat that came before Müggi III (I, II and Nönneli, whose black-and-white markings made her look like a nun). Giger was a cat guy; friends and agents said he was sweet, gentle, shy. Yet he is best known for designing an alien so terrifying that many audience-members in 1979 fainted —while others fled and coated the cinema bathroom in vomit.
Dan O’Bannon, who would go on to write Alien, met the artist in 1975. O’Bannon was in Paris to supervise the special effects that would never happen on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s famously doomed adaptation of Dune. He had sold everything he owned to move to Paris and commit himself to Jodorowsky’s mad plan, which involved rounding up a team of what Jodorowsky called his “spiritual warriors” —visual artists Chris Foss and Mœbius, actors like Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, and even Salvador Dalí — the kind of people who could make a vision as outlandish as his own become a reality. One of them, recommended by Dalí, was Giger. (Before the whole enterprise fell apart, Giger made five paintings of the Harkonnens, including a fortress that wasn’t in Frank Herbert’s novel and was purely an invention of Jodorowsky. The design later turned up, in a way, in Prometheus.)