H.R. Giger, the Swiss surrealist sculptor and painter who died earlier this year, is the subject of the new documentary Dark Star: H.R. Giger’s World. While the film is not available in the U.S. yet, a trailer is now online. The reclusive Giger was best known for his Academy Award-winning design contributions to the Alien franchise. This new documentary shares the last years of the artist’s life, and reveals how deeply he resided within his own dark artistic visions.
Giger states an artistic mission to depict and share his dreams with others, while admitting that his art is sufficiently creepy enough that, had he shared it with his parents, it could “scare them to death.” It’s a safe bet that there wasn’t a lot of little Hans’ art stuck to the Giger family fridge.
The trailer captures the life Giger constructed as both beautiful and off-putting. Slow pans across his studio shift in and out of focus, presenting an array of biomechanical creations, while archival footage of the young artist is cross-cut with an older, solitary Giger.
As Giger pulls open heavy wooden doors to reveal Alien-like sculptures bathing in an otherworldly fountain, a foreboding soundtrack suggests that his dreams and waking life are commingled into a frothing vortex of the macabre. But then you see him riding a ghoulish version of the Silver Spoons scale-model train through an outdoor sculpture park of his own devising, and it’s revealed Giger was a regular guy like everybody else.