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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Homage to Ken Russell's "Mahler"?

leading from 

Alien Resurrection

a) In Jean-Pierre Jeunet's movie Alien Resurrection, after the character Ripley 8 has surgery to remove that Alien Queen and she is then placed in a cell wrapped in a shroud like garment in which the Ripley 8 character is symbolically being born.  If we then think about British cinema since the 1970s, one interesting film filled with strange visual images was a movie about the film composer Gustave Mahler in which a woman in a cocoon is seen across the rocks by the sea and then she emerges from the cocoon to be able to crawl across the rocks to kiss a sculpture of the face of Mahler

b) Ripley 8 breaking out from a cocoon that is her surgical gown from Alien Resurrection.

c) Scene from Ken Russell's Mahler of a woman emerging from a cocoon

 

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Paul W Anderson

1. Almost directed Alien Resurrection
2. Event Horizon
3. Alien Vs Predator
4. Paul Anderson vs Peter Briggs

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