'Alien' Designer H.R. Giger's Legacy Is Remembered in a New Documentary

There are few in the world of cinema who have the same knack as the late H.R. Giger in creating a brooding sense of the creepy and macabre, which he so expertly crafted with his trademark “bio-mechanical” aesthetic in 1979 sci-fi horror film Alien. Now, one year after his death at age 74, Giger is the subject of a new documentary Dark Star: HR Giger’s World, which is opening this Friday. The documentary, directed by Belinda Sallin, explores Giger’s grotesque world via an intimate portrait of the man in his home — decorated with a menagerie of sinister motifs of skulls, hyper-sexualized cyborg women, aliens and baby head carvings — and finds that beneath a surprisingly jovial complexion, Giger’s approach to horror is borne from a very exacting methodology rooted in the believable and anatomical, which is precisely what makes his creations so uncanny and horrifying.