Giger and the tale of the Scarecrow

leading from

Development of Giger's art

sketch from 1961 published in the book Giger ARh+

As a child, HR Giger was told the story of a scarecrow and the impressions that it left followed him through life and he noticed that it occasionally found its way into his artwork. He thought that this stake-bound life showed him the senselessness of existence, and existence better never begun. Many of his works reflected this hopeless state of enslavement which left no room for religious beliefs  He lived much of his life with a nihilist point of view but towards the end of his life, he actually felt quite fulfilled.

Sources Quotes

1. HR Giger: The first impaled figure to fascinate me as a child was a living scarecrow in a local fairytale, which I made my mother read me again and again. I think this stake-bound life, for whom redemption meant death as soon as possible, showed me the senselessness of existence. An existence better never begun. Many of my works reflect this state of hopeless enslavement which leaves no room for religious beliefs.  (Giger ARh+ , p26, 2001)
2. Petra Wallace, via email : In HR Giger ARh+, you speak of a story your mother used to tell about a scarecrow, and how it spoke to you as a child about the "senselessness of existence". Do you still feel that existence is worthless today? Or, given the passing years, has life become more important to you? Does life make more sense the older you get?
   HR Giger:The story you are referring to is a fairy tale which impressed very much in my early youth and has followed me through life. Such dark fairy tales left quite an impression with me at the time. It has occasionally also found its way into my work. I actually do feel quite fulfilled with my life these days. (Bizarre Magazine  #195, 2012)

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The Windowlickers I, II & III

leading from

Development of Giger's art.

 

a) Windowlickers I, II & III (lithographs 1999)
Giger created the Windowlickers series of drawings in 1999 according to the Giger 2001 diary by Taschen. Drawings from this year have 999 merged with 666 as if they are loops with two hooks. The first one shows the terrible mask with penises coming down the side and flowers around the upper part of the head. The second shows heads with the same face hanging in the air with beards of long whispy hairs. One platted the other sticking out in the form of spikes.  As if they were shrunken heads. The third in a series is a toilet bowl with perhaps flowers around the seat

When I first picked up the HR Giger diary by Taschen in 2001, and noticed the Windowlickers drawings by Giger, I assumed it was a homage since he might have been so inspired by what he saw in a photo or the video and still do today, whatever the truth might be.

The Windowlickers I (1999) (source https://plus.google.com)

The Windowlickers II (1999) (source https://plus.google.com/)

The Windowlickers III (1999) (source https://plus.google.com)

b) Windowlickers video for Aphex Twin with special thanks to Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis
The video for Aphex Twin's Windowlickers is often said to have been made in 1998 but it's definitely known to have been released in March 1999. There is one character who is the most ugliest of the women who are all ugly with caricature masks of Richard D James. This one has flowers in her hair and side plats suspended in the air. The masks were sculpted and designed by Paul Catling and Jordu Schell worked on masks and hair as well. Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis are thanked in the final credits.

c) Giger involved in Windowlickers rumour hits the media
Since then it has come into people's beliefs that H R Giger created the concept the design of this one mask which I might assume was based a concept by Chris Cunningham's. It has got to the point where the Guardian newspaper believes this and even Creativereview.co.uk have jumped onto the idea of Giger's involvement as well. However Giger has not talked about any involvement in Chris Cunningham's videos and the nearest thing he had said of any acknowledgement Cunningham's work was when he admitted in 2000 in an interview for Esoterra magazine #9 to being a fan of the "Come To Daddy" video by Chris Cunningham for Aphex Twin and we have the Windowlickers drawing too. Chris Cunningham who has been a sculptor for the Alien costume for ADI in the Alien 3 production and concept designer for Alien Resurrection has not talked in interviews about working with HR Giger at all let alone asking him for a concept drawing. Perhaps Giger , if he were involved, would have taken the project a little bit more seriously than just the evidence that we've seen, and would have offered side views etc and have some concern about what was to be made of his design considering that what amounted to generally being the ADI team were involved. It might be a issue over a single mask briefly used in a single pop video but as a fan of Chris Cunningham's music videos and a fan of the work of HR Giger this matter is of importance to me. Before I believe that Giger was involved in the actual video's concept design rather than an appreciator of the imagery afterwards, I want some hard information, none reveals itself

Source Quote

1. R.F. Paul:  What about electronic music?
   
   Giger: No, not too much. I like Aphex Twin though. Come to daddy is very good. Very amusing. (Esoterra #9)
2. A still from the video for the 2005 song Windowlicker by Aphex Twin. Original conceptual art by HR Giger. (http://www.theguardian.com)
3. The two women, among others, accompany James in his limousine while their faces morph into James' own likeness, and are later joined by a woman with a horrifically ugly, buck-toothed, deformed face, which is a likeness of a sketch by Swiss artist H. R. Giger titled "The Windowlickers". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windowlicker)
4. He would work on other projects ("Poltergeist II: The Other Side," "Species," as well as uncredited stint on the video for Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker") but it's "Alien" (and the franchise) that he'll be remembered by film fans for. (http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/rip-h-r-giger-1940-2014-watch-2-hour-20-minute-documentary-on-the-making-of-alien-20140513)
5. Until towards the end of the song when the booming bass part comes in and there is a heavily deformed, buck toothed Richard James’ face based on HR Giger’s sketch “The Windowlickers” (http://www.director-file.com/cunningham/aphex-twin/)
6. In 1999 a sketch by Giger also made its way into one of the most infamous music videos of all time – Chris Cunningham's unsettling ten-minute epic for Aphex Twin track, Windowlicker. Called The Windowlickers, Giger's original grinning face became one of the Aphex Twin 'masks' adopted towards the end of Cunningham's film; the most bizarre of them (if that's possible) and the only one that differs from the legion of Richard James faces. (The masks in the film were designed and sculpted by Paul Catling.) (http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2014/may/hr-giger)
   

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X files Season 6, Episode 1. The Beginning

a) Gillis and Woodruff were given the task of creating the vicious creature that would become a stereotypical grey in X Files Fight for the future and the creatures final transformation into the grey would occur in the X Files Season Six, episode 1 that would carry on the story that took place.

b) Dan O'Bannon came up with the idea that a victim would be implanted with a foetus and it would be used as a host for this thing. The creature, known as the chestburster is the Alien's second stage, and it simply runs about eating, mindlessly carnivorous. It's tremendously hungry and needs to reproduce. But at this stage, the creature is still controlled and nurtured by adult aliens. It then grows to maturity with incredible speed, until the chestburster begins losing appendages and becomes more and more harmless. Finally, its bloodlust gone, the Alien becomes a mild, intelligent creature, capable of art and architecture, which lives a full , scholarly life of 200 years.  In the movie, the chestburster's transformation to the near human sized alien is implied by the discovery of the chestburster's skin

Brett discovers the shedded Chestburster's skin in Alien

c) Gillis and Woodruff went ahead and basically used to this general concept to further the idea of the alien grey's life cycle without mentioning the source of the ideas and those who would have known enough about Alien would have wondered what's going on here.

d) A human becomes infected, he dies and the creature draining the body of all it's proteins etcetera bursts out through the victims chest.

 

The creature soon sheds its skin in a way similar to the discovery of the skin shed by the chestburster in Alien

The wild alien creature in the nuclear reactor pool begins to shed its skin to finally become an adult grey.

Shedding the skin on its fingers

The creature sheds the skin of its face finally revealing the face of the new adult grey within. We never got to see the adult version of the alien creature as Dan O'Bannon might have imagined it.

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Giger's letter to Twentieth Century Fox no.2 (December 19, 1997)

GIGER'S SECOND LETTER TO: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FROM: H.R.GIGER December 19, 1997 However Twentieth Century Fox is maneuvering its way through the legal issues in order to keep HR Giger far away from proper credit and profit, one thing is certain: the Biomechanical style of HR Giger in any Alien sequel is obvious to everyone. No future Alien copyist or imitator will be able to hide that fact. The Alien Lifeforms, environments, the whole Alien world is created and copyrighted under the law by HR Giger. This is confirmed in the Academy Award of 1980 for "Best Achievement for Visual Effects." I reserve all rights to my own intellectual property. The copyrights granted to Fox are only for the uses which have been contracted and paid for. In regards to the new Alien development called the Newborn, it is just another Giger design, which you will realize when you look beneath the shell of the adult Alien head, as seen in the photos on page 60 of my book. The human skull under the face has been exposed and the creature's sinewy body has been contaminated by deformed features. Fox, however, tries to deny HR Giger's influence. No objection was ever voiced to the title of the book named after its mentor "HR Giger's Alien", published by Sphinx in Basel and Big O in London. It would have been wise for Fox to add my name into the main and final credits, immediately, five weeks ago. For every day that passes without this embarassing wrong-doing being fixed the damage grows. Since Fox refused my request for a screen credit, I have received hundreds of e-mail messages from Alien fans, all of them stating what an outrage it is that hundreds of million dollars are made on Giger's Alien but that his name could not be mentioned among the several hundred other names, even in the credits. Tom Woodruff's Alien design style is simply "HR Giger's Biomechanical". Woodruff, an excellent effect specialist, said about his "Alien Viper's Nest" : "It is like an HR Giger's painting come to life." Yes it is. It has been newly stolen from my book "Necronomicon". As photographed from above, you will see that it is a section of my painting "Passagen-Tempel / Eingangspartie" (Passage Temple / entrance section) Work # 262. This painting existed three years before the first Alien movie had even started to be filmed. During my participation on the first Alien, Fox was permitted to use my books as a guide and my book "Necronomicon" was Ridley Scott's bible. There can be no Alien sequel, not even in the future, that is not influenced by H R Giger's Biomechanical style. (at present the only source for me for this letter is http://jingleheimerschmidtj.tripod.com/giger.html)

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Giger's letter to Twentieth Century Fox no.1 (November 13, 1997)

TO: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FROM: H.R.GIGER November 13, 1997 The Alien Quartet has, from the very beginning, contained my unique and personal style. For the first film ALIEN, I was awarded an Oscar for "Best Achievement for Visual Effects". In ALIENS, a film I was not asked to work on, I still received a screen credit for "Original Alien Design". On ALIEN 3, I was cheated out of the Oscar nomination received by that film because 20th Century Fox gave me the credit, "Original Alien Design" again, instead of "Alien 3 Creature Design", as it was my rightful title in accordance to my contract and the work I had performed on the film. In 1976 I had completed two paintings, "Necronom IV" and "Necronom V", in which two long-headed creatures appeared. In 1977 these paintings, were published in my book, NECRONOMICON, by Sphinx Verlag, Basel, in German. It was in this version of the book that Ridley Scott, in his search for a credible Alien creature, came across these two paintings and decided, on them for the full-grown Alien, using the words "That's it!" The statement has been graciously repeated by Ridley Scott in almost every interview about his work on ALIEN. The creatures in ALIEN:RESURRECTION are even closer to my original Alien designs than the ones which appear in ALIENS and ALIEN 3. The film also resurrects my original designs for the other stages of the creature's life-cycle, the Eggs, the Facehugger and the Chestburster. ALIEN:RESURRECTION is an excellent film. What would it look like without my Alien life-forms? In all likelihood, all the sequels to ALIEN would not even exist! The designs and my credit have been stolen from me, since I alone have designed the Alien. So why does not Fox give me the credit I rightfully earned? 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. (at present the only source for me for this letter is http://jingleheimerschmidtj.tripod.com/giger.html)

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Chris Cunningham

 

1. Alien artwork from early 1990s

2. Alien Resurrection concept art

3. Alien Resurrecton inspires "Africa Shox" music video?   

4. Giger's The Windowlickers I, II & III

5. Did Cunningham's Rubber Johnny video inspire early Fifield creature concepts?

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Alien Resurrection leads to Chris Cunningham's "Africa Shox" music video

leading from

Alien Resurrection
and 
Chris Cunningham/ Halls

a) In the 1997 film Alien Resurrection, an armed soldier who was a black man aboard the Auriga goes to investigate the acid eaten hole in the floor in the cell where Dr Gediman has been pulled down through by the aliens.  One he is in there, the aliens push the button to spray his with liquid nitrogen gas and his skin and flesh freezes, his arm sticks to the wall, his arm breaks in half and he is left with an arm stump. The cinematography as we know was by Darius Khondji

b) Two years later in 1999, Chris Cunningham, one of the star concept designers for Alien Resurrection who was also a famous music video director at the time directed a video for the track "Africa Shox" Left Field with Africa Bambaata, and on this video collaborated with Darius Kondji. The video featured an ill looking black man reaching out for help, and then he his arm falls off and is revealed to be hollow and brittle and so he is left with a hollow stump , then he shatters a foot and is left with a hollow leg stump, and later falls over, soon he hops onto the road and is then hit by a car and is smashed into pieces.

c) Having seen the scene where the soldier with his arm breaking off due to being sprayed with liquid nitrogen in Alien Resurrection, it seems obvious where the seed of the idea for the Afrix Shox video came from.

1. Stills from Alien Resurrection (1997)

2. "Africa Shox" music video by Chris Cunningham (1999)

3. Stills from the "Africa Shox" music video by Chris Cunningham (1999)

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