Distinctive World Post

Distinctive World and Artstyle                                                                                Matthew Lawson

There have been a large variety of art styles across history and some of them have lived on as iconic for many parts of society. Sometimes an artist's style defines not only the piece of art but can define what the artist will be most well known for making. In this, I will be doing over the two distinctive styles to create the ‘Alien’ universe; by the styles of H R Giger, Chris Foss and Ron Cobb.

H R Giger became well known because of his designs and artwork on the 1979 film 'Alien'. He created all of the designs for the extraterrestrial parts of the film, including the Xenomorph designs. The idea behind the artstyle (which would be become known as Biomechanical (mixing technology and life forms)) is Giger had night terrors and tried to visualize his nightmares into his original drawings. Some of the original art pieces that he created were known as 'The Astro-Eunuchs' and ‘LI L’. Giger's idea was to combine machine, environment, and human with sexual undertones. A lot of the concept art designs had subtleties of sex, even some of those ideas made their way into the final film. An example is the Xenomorphs inner mouth that evokes “vagina dentata” (a vagina with teeth).

His ideas were first turned down from the production of Dune, until he was brought on to work on the production of Alien with Ridley Scott. However some of his style can also been seen in not just the creatures he created, but the sci-fi ships he designed. Some of his original work was designing starships with the same style. His concept art for Dune follows the same style but up-sizing the scale of the created art with the same principles in mind.

The other half of the design was the human technology mainly the design of the ship 'Nostromo'. Ron Cobb and Chris Foss combined ideas created the concept of the spaceship. They mainly based the exterior of the ship with ideas from Gothic horror movies such as Nosferatu (trying to make it a floating Gothic cathedral). They had certain locations, buildings and environments in mind when using the style to create the area. To create claustrophobia in such a large environment, they made the interiors very closely compact with very long corridors and no side passages. Compare this to designs of Star Wars 1977, the corridors on the death star for example have multiple side passages, have turns along the path and is fully lit. With a straight path (with no side paths) it subconsciously adds tension; because the fear that something deadly is on the other side we have no options than to run straight forward or back, where the threat can easily spot you.

Combining these together created a claustrophobic and isolated universe, which set the standard for the rest of the Alien franchise and many other projects afterwards.

Other creators have taken some of those ideas and created their own films.  Examples are the ‘The Thing’ 1982 (an isolated environment trapped with deadly threat), ‘Predator’ 1987 (being hunted by a threat you don’t know if you can kill)  and ‘Inseminoid’ 1989 (an alien threat with more explicit sexual tones for fear). A game that uses some of these ideas is the 2008 game ‘Dead Space’ (being put into long, tight corridors and trapped in rooms with enemies that you are not sure where they are).  

All of these examples, however all take from the Chris Foss and Ron Cobb artstyle. As for H R Giger; the idea of Biomechanical beings in the modern media, the artstyle mostly died out. One of the few games that used the idea were 2D shoot em up games, such as R-Type (1987), and one of the very few movies that has used a Biomechanical for some assets of a production is the 2016 movie ‘Independence Day Resurgence’ and the video game ‘Warframe’ (2013). Specifically for the Alien concept art designs, however it does not have the extent that H R Giger uses the artstyle. The style of Biomechanical has mostly been taken up by tattoo artists such as Eric De L’etoile.

However the main example of both off these concepts being put to use again, has to be part of the Alien Universe, the 2014 game ‘Alien Isolation’. In a way the premise is similar to original movie “Go to an isolated location and get trapped with a monstrous threat you cannot face”. The way that the gameplay uses the concepts from the art concepts of the original film is by, forcing you down long, gloomy and tight corridors. With openings along the walls and ceiling so it can keep you guessing where the Alien is. This also corresponds with the way the Alien functions; it has an unpredictable pattern of movement it can show up anytime it wants. If it finds you, you are done for because the Alien moves faster than you and will easily track you down.

So, how can these artstyles be used in future productions? Considering that the styles from Cobb and Foss have been used in a decent amount of productions, I want to focus on Giger. The main problem with branching out this idea is that it is meant to physiologically creep the audience, while having sexual undertones to through them off. Well an idea is that in a distant dystopian world, Humans (or another sentient species) have become enthralled by Cybernetic enhancements, they have become as close to androids as possible, fooling themselves into still thinking that they are humans, by trying look like what they remember Humans to be (appearing in the uncanny valley of humanoid designs), by slowly showing how they changing into something abnormal and eerie. Somewhat similar to the Li 1 drawing he made in 1974.