All Photos By Gail 

In France in 1975, screenwriter Dan O’Bannon was collaborating with Director Alejandro Jodorowsky  on an adaptation of Frank Herbert‘s 1965 novel, Dune, when he met the artist HR Giger. Jodorowsky had been introduced to Giger’s work by Salvador Dali, and had brought him on to create designs for the film.

While the feature ultimately fell through, O’Bannon couldn’t get Giger’s drawings out of his head. The screenwriter recalled “ending up writing a script about a Giger monster,” which would eventually become the influential franchise Alien.

Released in 1979, the first film,  directed by Ridley Scott, featured Giger‘s designs as the eponymous monster — known as a Xenomorph, from the Greek for “alien shape“ – which embodies the artist’s “bio mechanical“ style with its human and animal bones, combined with machine elements like tubes and wires.

Installation View

Giger credits authors like HP Lovecraft, and Edgar Allan Poe as influences on his terrifying creations,  along with the chilling nightmares he experienced that provided source material for his drawings, helping him work through his visions. In the film, Giger‘s alien, growing and spawning by parasitically feeding off humans,  instills  a fear not just of a time when we are no longer the apex predators, but also one in which our destruction brings about dystopian reproductive futures.

Even beyond that specific narrative, these monsters remain horrifying, uncanny in their grotesque combination of the organic and the mechanical, and blur the line between flesh and machine. Both primal and futuristic, they bring form to our fear of humanity’s own creations, evolving into something beyond our control.

Photographed as part of the Exhibit New Humans: Memories of the Future at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan.