Warning: the ensuing featurette flunks the "breakfast test". Swiss horror artist HR Giger is a conceptual pornographer, an esoteric eroticist. He paints dreams - dreams laden with chromium arachnids, gibbering infants and stylised genitalia. So if you happen to be perusing this over a bowl of cornflakes - why not flick forward to those nice book reviews? What follows may set your belly heaving.
Fame arrived late for Giger, a portly ex-furniture designer vaguely reminiscent of a 1960s Bond villain. He was nudging 40 when upcoming British director Ridley Scott, dazzled by his grotesque sleeve work on Emerson Lake and Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery LP, hired him to design a bug-eyed monster for the formulaic space chiller he was about to shoot.
Giger gave Scott his monster - and a whole lot more. A high water mark in gothic modernism , his 'Alien' tapped a raft of late 20th century neuroses. It was all there, glistening beneath the beastie's slime-glazed carapace: oedipal phobias, dread of insects, phallic metaphors. "Yeeurgh!" we howled. "This stuff is gross. Show us more!"
Alien earned Giger a best special effects Oscar. In the movie's wake, he issued a sprawling set of pre-production sketches. His noodlings were a great deal sicker than anything that made it to screen. Giger, it became apparent, was a troubled soul. Art sated his psycho-sexual demons. He painted to purge.
The success of Alien brought his masterpiece 1977 Necromonicon folio to wider attention. Taking its title from a fictional grimoire conceived by 1920s pulp hack HP Lovecraft, the tome offered a uniquely new vision of horror; febrile, hothouse, marinated in taboos.
As his reputation flourished, Giger found himself eagerly sought by the entertainment industry. He collaborated on Stephen Spielberg's tacky Poltergeist II (a project he later disowned) and published rococo pre-production etchings for a still-born mid-1970s adaptation of Frank Herbert's cult classic Dune. His ghoulish portrait of former Blondie singer Debbie Harry adorned her bestselling 1981 Kookoo LP. Giger had made it to the mall!
After a conflict ridden return to the Alien franchise in the early 1990s - the new FX team partially rejected his designs - and a lacklustre contribution to workaday SF chiller Species, the maestro has lately taken a back seat, overseeing the opening of themed "Giger" bars in Switzerland and Tokyo (he recently distanced himself from the latter, reputedly a Yakuza den) and curating an art museum close to his native Chur. Perhaps those demons have finally vacated his subconscious.