Sad news reaches us of the death of one of the undoubted greats of cinema design. Following complications arising from a fall, HR Giger, the man who terrified a gazillion film-goers with his Alien creatures in the suspenseful horror, has departed this world for the next. Giger snagged a deserved Oscar for his multi-mouthed, stomach-popping space monsters and claustrophobic sets, and his designs were used in several successful sequels. As well as his film work, Giger was a surrealist painter and sculptor of note, and the art world is the poorer for his passing.
Some kind of demigod to sci-fi fanatics, goths, metalheads (Giger fashioned Korn’s mic-stand) and general obsessives of the macabre – there’s one place where the most devoted of devotees will be making tracks to as a place of pilgrimage: The HR Giger Museum, which has burrowed itself into the innards of the medieval Chateau St Germain in Gruyères, Switzerland. Of particular note, its dark and fantastical bar is just as wonderfully gruesome as one might expect – a sort of surreal cave supported by arches of spinal vertebrae, littered with sculptural Harkonnen chairs which might be fashioned from the bones of some long-digested prey. If you make it out of the bar alive, as so many clearly haven’t, the museum is home to many of Giger’s key works dating from the 1960s to the present day.
Photo, Annie Bertram
Photo, Matthias Belz
Photo, Annie Bertram
