A nightmarish future was the vision of artist, H.R. Giger. Selling his first artworks in 1964 made it so that even at the start of his career he became known for his surrealistic biomechanical dreamscapes. His most famous book, Necronomicon, which depicts his eerie artworks, inspired the direction of the movie Alien and the director hired Giger to produce artworks and conceptual designs for the film. The career Giger had built based on his nightmarish biomechanical visions led to him being one of the foremost artists of Fantastic Realism.
Most often, Giger’s work depicted the cross-breeding of human and machine, creating deformed humanoids. These futuristic images drew inspiration from historical travesties such as the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wars in Korea and Vietnam, and overall chemical and biological warfare. The thought of the effects of these events on humans along with his own personal creative visions has formed his style of artwork. Once while speaking with Aliens’ co-writer Dan O’Bannon, Giger had stated, “I am afraid of my visions.” And O’Bannon replied, “It’s just your mind,” to which Giger says, “That is what I am afraid of.” Which speaks to how truly ahead of its time Giger’s horror artwork was. His creation of biomechanoids has had a long lasting effect on the world of fantasy and abstract industrialism.
Giger’s most well-known works are the conceptual designs for the film Alien. His ideas transformed the original movie concept from an underwhelming monster flick into the horrifying classic that it became. The scripting was motivated by Giger’s designs and had become horrifying due to the nightmarish images it had been derived from. It is unlikely that the movie would have been so successful or would have even gone down the path that it did without Giger’s concept design. The designs played a major role in the entire creation of the film. The influence Giger had with his designs has forever changed movies in the horror genre as well. The creation of the xenomorph sparked a new beginning for movie monsters with its futuristic take on the merging of humanoids and the unknown, the sinuous and the skeletal, the insectoid and the reptilian. It created an entirely new outlook on the extra-terrestrial.
When creating environments, Giger had a similar outlook as he did when creating humanoid forms such as the xenomorph. Doing so by combining aspects of human form and machine. The contrast between the organic forms and mechanical forms creates uneasiness and mysteriousness within the environment. Also, his use of lighting adds to this effect because it is often dark and dim. The atmosphere created by these aspects sets the scene for his nightmarish visions.
Concept art as a whole has a large effect on world building within fantasy worlds. Without the direction of these designs, storytelling is unable to come to life. Futuristic cyberpunk concept art controls how viewers see the impending world within a specific fantasy world. For example, Giger’s concept art was able to create the entire vision surrounding the film Alien, from its killing machine monster to the spaceship that the movie was taking place in. The industrial and futuristic vision that Giger had was able to set up the direction of the movie. His concept art was able to take the world within Alien to the next level and even revolutionize horror movies as a whole along the way.
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