The Facehugger

From

Ridley Scott's Alien Monster 

Michael Seymour: The first stage, 
when it initially appears and leaps 
from that sort of egg shape and plants 
itself onto the face of a human, is a 
curious, grasping , crablike sort of 
hand creature. We called that first 
stage the "Facehugger" 
 (American Cinematographer, August 1979, p805)

O'Bannon's sketch, Egg with facehugger

a) Surprise Phonecall

Dan O'Bannon who was in LA and H R Giger who was in Switzerland were communicating via phone. Giger noted a 30 minute conversation that took place in July 1977 when Dan called him to talk about the Alien film project. Dan explained to Giger what happened to him once the Dune project was over and he went back to LA and fell ill with a stomach complaint. He would send a letter telling him about the project, one copy in English and another in German, and Giger would be able to see if the project was for him.

part of Dan O'Bannon's letter

b) Thousand Dollar Cheque 

Out of the little money they had at the time for the project, Twentieth Century fox had finally sent Giger a cheque for  $1000 to get started on paintings of designs for the Alien movie, so that he didn't have to feel as if he was working for nothing as he did on Dune. He sent a letter to H R Giger with descriptions in basic English of what he wanted the Facehugger to do, that it was supposed to be small, and it was like an octopus like creature that would leap onto the person's face, wrap its tentacles around behind the person's head and then it would have an organ that was an ovipositer which would be shoved down the person's throat.

work 364a, Giger's facehugger sketch

c) Giger's first idea

Giger took note of the descriptions that he had been given as well as the sketches. He understood that the creature was supposed to jump out of a big egg, so he thought that it must be a creature large enough to fill the egg, and when it jumped out, it has a tale like a springfender or a spring as in a jack-in-the-box.

The facehugger's form would bedetermined through its function, following his background as an industrial designer, everything must have a function. He was thinking that if something that jumps out and then holds onto someone's face needs fingers or hands. Giger liked long fingers and so he gave the creature these. Normally if someone is sitting on another person's face, that other person can't breath through the nose, and would automatically open his mouth. Then the monster goes down. 

work 365a, Giger's Facehugger sketch

d) Trouble up at the airport customs

A few weeks later, Giger mailed large photographic transparencies to O'Bannon and others at Fox. When they arrived at the airport, the custom officials didn't understand what they were and were alarmed. They had to personally come down to LAX and pick what H R Giger has sent up,

LAX airport 1978

e) Vision of the fingers

When Dan O'Bannon finally got these photographs for the designs he had done for the facehugger and he held them up to the light where he could see them, and was stunned at what he saw, there was the lobed creature attached to the face of a person, but instead of tentacles, there were fingers! It was these fingers that amazed Dan and and as soon as he saw those fingers he knew that he would do whatever he had to do to get those fingers into the film.

work 364

f) Eclectic design

A big meeting took place, with Roger Dicken being told what the creature should look like and he had no idea what to make of it. Finally Ridley Scott pulled out Giger's Necronomicon as a guidebook  and he pointed out various parts that he liked. Dan O'Bannon could see that Roger Dicken was very confused about the whole thing so he decided to ask Ridley if he could have a go at drawing the creature from the elements picked out by Ridley, he said "go ahead" so Dan went over to the art department with Roger Dicken, they took a drafting table and a huge piece of paper with some pencils. He drew two heads on the paper and then opened Giger's book and put it down before them. He said "Ridley wanted part of this body, right?" and he sketched it out, he drew the fingers that Ridley liked and he added the tail as well.

work 365

g) Joe Petagno's contribution

Joe Petagno, artist well known for his Motorhead album covers remembers being involved in the concept design process for the Facehugger when H R Giger was not around at Shepperton. He is known to have drawn a version of the Facehugger on Kane's face with a long penis like rod going down his throat to impregnate Kane with its offspring.  It was said that it was just the way writer Dan O'Bannon wanted it but Ridley Scott decided against it due to it being too explicit. Dan was known to not happy about the situation.

Ridleygram showingthe facehugger's underbelly see the genesis of the design  for the sculpted underbelly

h) Giger arrives from Switzerland

As they put together the concept, Giger came in, his plane had arrived from Switzerland and he had with him the designs for the facehugger that he had been working on and they so happened to be similar to the designs that Dan had sketched with Roger. Giger's version had an eye on the back, and looked more like the palm of a hand. Dan looked at Giger and said "Oh that's good!" but Giger looked at the designs on their designs on the drawing board and said "No, that's much better" which pleased Dan immensely. Dan asked "should I continue with it" and Giger replied "Oh yes", so the drawing went on replacing Giger's concept.

i) Giger's Facehugger design

Giger's idea was that the creature was going to be very smooth and slimy with eight long, fine but

strong fingers, as if it were made from two hands, however the main difference between his idea and the final one was that his was going to be translucent. He started building the chestburster and the facehugger , he had to give up on the chestburster, it was known that his design for this was going in the wrong direction however which left him unsatisfied with it, but the the reason he gave up on the facehugger was that the producers wanted him to get the big Alien finished in time.

HR Giger's unused facehugger designs

j) Cobb's skeletal understructure

Dan O'Bannon with the design he was putting together realised that there was the need to create a skeletal understructure for the creature that it would need to hook the fingers onto,  and Ron Cobb sketched some ideas that worked as a solution that Dan drew out. He drew everything in life size and they went with that. Dan O'Bannon considered the creature that they created as something eclectically constructed from what Ridley and Giger wanted with ideas from from Ron Cobb and Roger Dicken. Once they put it through the blueprint machine, Ridley okayed it and Roger went off to build it.

Dicken with his Chestburster 
and Facehugger creations

k) Roger Dicken's own concept

Roger Dicken did have his own concept for a facehugger that would have been different and more in keeping with his own aesthetics as a monster maker. He would have like to have made it a little more scaly  and have little barbs like rose thorns on the leg and down the tail. Since this creature was self preserving, he felt that you shouldn't be able to get hold of the creature. He also would have like to have like there to have been barbed fingertips inside of smooth human type nails that they wanted

The tail was moved simply with a wire and Ridley wanted to fill the sacks on the side of the creature with slime, but he put it in the sacs and it clogged up the air tubes which made the sacs pulsate. They used surgical jelly on the hugger to get the slimy gooey effects

Colour photo of Roger Dicken with Alien life forms (source: blackholereviews.blogspot.co.uk/)

Sources Quotes:

1. H R Giger: Early Design. July 1977 I get an entirely unexpected telephone call from Dan O'Bannon in Hollywood. He speaks very slowly, so that in spite of my poor English, I can understand the important things in store for me. He is talking about a new project for a film called Alien. He tells me that, when the Dune project broke down, he went back to Hollywood, and soon afterwards he was very ill. A tiresome stomach trouble. He had lain sick in bed at the home of his friend Ron Shusett, and had still managed to work out the Alien story with his friend's help. When he was better, he had written to the SF Horror Story and made the suggestion that the fearsome Alien monster should be created by me. Brandywine Productions, consisting of Gordon Caroll, David Giler and Walter Hill, were approached to put up the capital for the production of the film. He says he will let me have a letter setting out the main things he would want me to create. Unfortunately there isn't much money available yet, but enough to advance me a thousand dollars, so that I shouldn't feel that I'd be working for nothing anymore. However, first I have to wait for the letter, to see where the whole thing is really going to interest me. We are about half an hour talking on the telephone. Now I wait excitedly to see what will happen next. (Giger's Alien, p8)
2. HR Giger: 11 July 1977. O'Bannon's letter has arrived. One version in German and one in English. Also some explanatory sketches by Ron Cobb (who also had been working with Jodorowsky) and by O'Bannon himself. The cheque for the promised thousand dollars has also arrived. Now I realy must get down to work (Giger's Alien, p10)
3. HR Giger: The story tells of spore capsules (eggs) inside a pyramid. This gives me the idea of using the Swiss egg-box for the basic structure of the pyramid (plate 363c). The eggs themselvs, which according to O'Bannon's sketch (plate 363b). (Giger's Alien, p10)
4. HR Giger: Plates 364a and 365a show the first sketches, as Alien I, the Facehugger, jumps out of the egg. In a good design, the function of the object ought to be clearly visible, so I give the Facehugger a tail to be used as a spring for taking off (like a tail on the jumping devil toy, plate 364a. ). The Facehugger, which clings to the face of its victims, gets spidery fingers on both sides (plate 363/364/365).  (Giger's Alien, p10)  (click here for work 363)
5. HR Giger: Once it gets its claws in, the Facehugger sinks its tube-like proboscis into the throat of the victim to deposit its embryos. Plate 364 shows how it uses a pince-like mechanism to force open the mouth. Plate 365, a variant, shows the sack in which the embryos are formed.(Giger's Alien, p10)
6. HR Giger:These are my proposals for the job they have given me. I have transparencies made of the pictures, sketches and models, send them to O'Bannon, and wait.(Giger's Alien, p10)
7. HR Giger: Still no answer from Hollywood. My book H.R. Giger's Necronomicon (in the French version) has just been published. I send O'Bannon the first copy, the ink is still went from the printers. (Giger's Alien, p10)
8. HR Giger: The Face Hugger, that was my first thing I did for Dan O'Bannon when he sent me I think about a thousand dollar to do some paintings for Alien and er, he gave me an explanation and erm drawings, and he said that it's jumping on a big egg , the egg is about that, so I thought that must be quite a big monster, so I did an enormous facehugger like a... and erm, he was jumping, I thought he could jump when his tail is like, is curved like a springfender or whatever, a jack in the box. (Alien Quadrology :documentry)
9. HR Giger:The first creature is like a crab sitting in the egg, I worked as an industrial designer in Zurich, so when they told me what the alien had to do, I could see the beast in terms of its func- tions. I designed the face-hugger with a tightly coiled tail so it could jump out of its egg, using the tail as a spring. I gave the first one a tail the shape of a spring, because its function commanded that it could jump out at the face. And also two hands so it could grab a hold of the head. (Cinescape vol 3,#9)
10. Dan O'Bannon: (35:53) I'm over here in LA, Giger's over there in Switzerland, we're communicating on the phone, Twentieth Century Fox has finally sent him some money to get started, and I sat down and wrote out some very simple parameters for what I wanted him to start designing, and I described in the simplest terms what the Facehugger was to do, that it was supposed to be a small, sort of octopus like thing that would leap onto a person's face, wrap its tentacles around behind the person's head and then it would have an organ , an ovipositer which would be shoved down the person's throat. ( AQ and BR commentary) 
11. Dan O'Bannon: SPORE PODS. These are leathery, egg shapes objects about one metre tall, which contain the larva of the Alien. They have a small"lid" in the top, which can pop off when a victim approaches.(Giger's Alien)
12. Dan O'Bannon:  THE ALIEN, FIRST PHASE. This is small, possibly octopoidal creature which waites inside the Spore Pod for a victim to approach. When someone touches the Spore Pod, the lid flies off, and the small Alien (First Phase), leaps out and attaches itself to the face of the victim. (Giger's Alien)
13. Dan O'Bannon: A few weeks later, Giger mailed these large photographic transparencies to us at Fox, they came through through customs, they didn't understand what they were and were alarmed, we had to personally come down to LAX and pick these things up, and I finally got these photographs that Giger had made for the designs he had done for the facehugger and I held them up to the light where I could see them, I was stunned at what I saw, there was the  (37:00) There was the lobed creature attached to the face of a person, but instead of tentacles, there were fingers! fingers! As soon as I saw those fingers I knew that I would do whatever I had to do to get those fingers into the film, ( AQ and BR commentary)  
14. H R Giger: Later on he said that, er, I should do it smaller, so I think something with human hands is always scary , so I , I had the finger, long fingers what is the most important part of the facehugger, and then it's a part, there's the little sexual like, yuh, and erm, the tube for erm that this beast has to... to... to... put in the... in the mouth, and then late, I had this hands in front, and then Dan O'Bannon draw them side... sidewards, that was better (Alien Quadrology  documentry)
    
15. Dan O'Bannon: I thought that the Facehugger deserved to be given a great deal of our attention, I thought it was a very important element in the story and nobody seemed to be finding the time for it. Giger's energies at that point were going in to sculpting the full size alien, the life size one, the one which was manshaped and the face hugger wasn't being designed.(Giger's Alien, p10)
16. Ace: I have seen the preliminaries for the new album's cover. It strikes me as very Gigeresque. Was he a major inspiration for this piece? What were the inspirations?
    Joe: Sorry, but I was working on the Alien the movie at Shepperton studios with Dan O Bannon before Hans Rudi was invited along and Motorhead was, as mentioned earlier, concieved 3 years before Alien was even thought about! Geiger's a very accomplished artist, but lets not get carried away!! (source:www.imotorhead.com/)
17. Richard J. Taylor: An artist named Petagno drew up the original design of the face hugger on Kanes face with a long penis like rod going down his throat impregnating Kane with its offspring.  The design was just the way writer Dan 'O Bannon wanted it but Ridley Scott cut it out due to it being too explicit.  Dan was generally pissed and the design was replaced by some shitty stock footage of blood pumping through veins.  Its interesting what you can learn from Sounds Of Death magazine (source http://www.oocities.org/hollywood/lot/9587/revA.htm)
18. H R Giger: 3 June 1978, Shepperton Studios. During a sleepless night, I've made sketches for the constructions of the monster and begin to model one of the Facehugger's long fingers with a wire frame, plastic tubes and plasticene (Giger's Alien, p54)
19. HR Giger: 29th July, 1978, Shepperton Studios. I agree with Scott to make the Aliens translucent. One should be able to see the skeleton, the blood circulatory system, the organs, etc. The skeleton has been cast in plast and I am starting to design the Facehugger's skin when - how could it be otherwise - the order arrives from production to stop work on the facehugger immediately and devote myself exclusively to designing the large monster, Alien III. (Giger's Alien, p54)
20. Roger Dicken was working concurrently on the face-huggers. In the absence of anything more definitive, he had been given Giger's original concept paintings, which were greatly out of scale, along with some instructions from Ridley on what modifications needed to be made. The guidance, however, proved inadequate to the task. (Cinefex 1: p47) 
21. Dan O'Bannon :There was a big meeting, and everybody was talking at the same time and trying to tell Dicken what the hell it should look like. Finally Ridley pulled out Giger's book and said: "Look. I want these fingers here on this page: and I want that over there for the back: and then I want the tail from this other page." And Dicken was just confused. He couldn't absorb it all the way it was being thrown at him. So I asked Ridley if I could take a try at it, and he said "Go ahead". So I went over to the art department with Dicken and we took a drafting table and a huge piece of paper and some pencils. I drew two heads on the paper, and then I opened Giger's book and put it down in front of us. "All right." I said. "Ridley said he wanted part of this body, right?" And I sketched it out. And he liked these fingers. So I added the fingers. And he wanted this tail.  (Cinefex 1: p47)
22. Giger: At school I worked as an industrial designer so everything must have a function. The Facehugger was determined through its function. You have to show that. I was thinking that something jumps out and then holds onto someone's face needs fingers or hands. Normally if someone is sitting on your face, you can't breathe through your nose, so you automatically open your mouth. Then the monster goes down. So it looked a little bit like a crab or a spider. I like long fingers, so it had these long fingers, then two hands and a spiral tail. That was it, The hands hold onto Kane's face and the tail wraps around his neck.(Clive Barker's A-Z of Horror, p70)
23. Dan O'Bannon :Well, while we were doing this, Giger came in - his plane had arrived from Switzerland - and he had some new designs for the face-hugger. And they were very similar to what we were putting together on the drawing board - not identical, but similar. His had an eye on the back, and the shape of it was much more like the palm of a hand. I looked at him and said "Oh that's good". Then Giger looked at the thing I was sketching with Dicken, and he said, "No, that's better, that's much better." I was really flattered. So I said "The I should continue with it?' And he said "Oh, yes." So we went on. When it came to trying to figure out what kind of skeletal understructure the thing would need so the fingers could hook up, I got Ron Cobb over and he scrawled out his ideas - which as usual were excellent. The I cleaned the whole thing up a little and did it in ink - exact size - and that's what we went with. I was really pleased, because I had eclectically constructed the face-hugger out of the things that Ridley wanted and the things that Giger wanted, and some good ideas from Cobb and from Dicken. Then we put it through the blueprint machine, got Ridley to okay it, and Roger went off and built it. (Cinefex 1: p47)
    
24. Roger Dicken: The facehugger was sculpted in plasticene. Then I made a plaster cast and a slush rubber mold which I strengthened with fiberglass on the underside, ending up with a hollow crab-like shell. Inside was a metal spine going down the middle, with little metal sections on it to hold the articulated fingers. All eight fingers were cast from the same mold and were latex covered, with aluminium armatures pinned at each joint so they would be absolutely flexible. These were sprung closed under tension. Then , from the tip of each finger, there were wires going up inside, so when you pulled on them, off camera, the fingers would open up and it could clip over the actor's face. To help hold it on, I put little eyelets in the fingertips and we ran rubber bands between them -  under the head where they wouldn't show. The tail was just a flexible cord covered with foam and latex. All together, I  made four or five face-huggers - one only that was fully articulated, one for underbelly shots, and about three dummy models that just had wire armatures so the fingers could be positioned ." (Cinefex 1: p47)
25. Roger Dicken: My own concept of the face-hugger was something a little more spiny, the claws - something you couldn't get ahold of even to try and pull it off. Self-preserving, in fact. To me, those long skinny fingers just didn't give the feeling that this thing had the strength to really cling onto someone's face like that. But that's how Ridley wanted them - thin and smooth. I'd also liked to have seen some barbed fingertips rather than smooth human-type nails they wanted. (Cinefex 1: p47) 
26. H R Giger: It was going to be very smooth and slimy with eight long, fine, but very strong fingers. The main difference was that mine, was going to be translucent. I wanted the inside to be visible because it had a sort of skeleton under the skin. After I'd started building the two small ones, though, the producers stopped me because they were worried that I wouldn't get the big one finished in time. (Cinefex 1: p47)
27. H R Giger: 15th August 1978, Shepperton Studios. The Facehugger has been finished by Dicken according to my initial directives. Not a trace of transparency but, in view of the means at our disposal, a perfect job. Scott's comment: I can work with that. Once again, I am surprised at how a material like latex, with a bit of jelly, smoke and a few strings ( to make it move like a puppet) can give the illusion of life. (Giger's Alien, p54)  
28. Ridley Scott: We wanted to be sure it looked like an animal, so we designed very much from the point of view of something which had come out of a womb. For that reason we decided to use the natural flesh tone. We tried coloring it in various other ways ans it always looked hokey - and less frightening, somehow. I think it's very effective now, half armadillo, half hard shell back; the pair of testicle like lungs and the real killer is that stinger tale. (Cinefex #1, p55, 9th para)
29.  Starburst:  What about the Facehugger which is the first alien we see after it has burst out of the egg and attached itself to Hurt's face?
    
    
    
    Roger Dicken: That was O'Bannon's design I think but as I say there were so many people on that film. I do know that O'Bannon drew something up and I built it. I would have liked it to have been a little more scaley and I would have liked to have little barbs like rose thorns on the legs and down the tail. As the alien was so self-preserving, you shouldn't be able to get a hold of the thing. I felt that in the film this wasn't well brought over.
    
    
    
    Starburst: Perhaps this was compensated for by the acidic blood that spurts out when they try to cut into the legs of the creature. Certainly that thing clinging to Hurt's face is an horrific image
    
    
    Roger Dicken : Image, yes, But I didn't feel they showed its strength enough
    
    
    Starburst:  Did you do the alien coming out of the egg
    
    
    Roger Dicken : Well, I was down to that scene. Ridley was going to use some footage from the Oxford Experimental Film Unit of embryo chickens forming, showing blood filling the capillaries and so on, and superimpose it over the egg interior, but that wasn't used. I don't know what came out of the egg or who did it, it happens so fast.
    
    
    
    Starburst: Did you do the scene where Hurt is lying on the table and the Alien shifts around and gets a better grip
    
    
    Roger Dicken : The tail was moved with a wire, that's all. We had some problems that day. Ridley wanted to fill the sacks on either side  of the hugger with slime. They had a big tub of this stuff imported from overseas, possibly to use in other scenes as well. When I put it in the sacs, it clogged up the air tubes which made the sacs pulsate. We used surgical jelly on the hugger to get the slimy, gooey effects. (Starburst #15, pp.9 - 13)
30. Giger: At school, I worked as an industrial designer, so everything must have a function. The facehugger was determined through its function. You have to show that. I was thinking that something that jumps out and then holds onto someone's face needs fingers or hands. Normally, if someone is sitting on your face, you can't breathe through your nose, so you automatically open your mouth. Then the monster goes down. So it looked a little bit like a crab or a spider. I like long fingers, so it had these long fingers, then two hands and a spiral tail. That was it. The hands hold onto Kane's face and the tail wraps around his neck. (Clive Barker's A-Z of Horror, p70)