WHAT INSPIRED H.R. GIGER? He invented the BIOMECHANICAL ALIEN featured in Ridley Scott's ground breaking movie - and he illustrated his own version of the Necrinomicon. His most infamous work was a poster inserted into the album sleeve of The Dead Kennedys' LP Frankenchrist. The image of rows of genitalia resulted in the band's vocalist Eric Reed Boucher, aka Jello Biafra, being tried for distributing harmful material to minors in 1986. The case was dismissed.
"He is our latter-day Hieronymus Bosch, the Dutch fabulist come again, demonic and erotic." - Harlan Ellison
HR Giger's Necronomicon was mainly inspired by the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft... Indeed, it was Lovecraft's literary weirdness which fuelled HR GIGER throughout his life - especially the idea of the 'GREAT OLD ONES' which are demonic spiritual entities which share characteristics similar to the demons of the GOETIA. The term "Old Ones" is employed in various contexts by various authors - and many of these Goetia-demonic-orientated projects have inspired HOLLYWOOD HORROR MOVIES... Lovecraft's first mention of the Old Ones appears in "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926), where he uses the term in reference to a group of primordial beings entombed in the mythical city of R'lyeh. At one point in the story, Inspector John Legrasse of the New Orleans police department raids a cult ritual gathering, capturing several of its members:
They worshipped, so they said, the "Great Old Ones" who are demonic entities authored by HP Lovecraft - yes, these were inventions of HP Lovecraft, but based on real-life books of demonological entities... These "Great Old Ones" lived long before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky - this singular motif of fiction spawned an entire new industry which today we call 'science fiction'....
HP Lovecraft's central idea was that those 'Old Ones' lived inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died... Of course this in turn inspired a whole weird hotch potch of cults - and some of HP Lovecraft's greatest admirers went on to become sadist grand wizards...
In Lovecraft's novella At the Mountains of Madness (1936), the "Old Ones" was another name for a fictional alien species, the Elder Things - and it was this particular tranche of fiction which captivated HR Giger's imagination beyond all others.
These Elder Things creatures were said to have built cities around the world in ancient times, but were eventually relegated to Antarctica. At the end of their reign, they were all but destroyed by the shoggoths, a slave race of their own creation... This parallels the ancient mythology taken up later by sic-fi fake-historian Zechariah Sitchin with his mythos of the Annunaki...
This HP Lovecraft set of works and ideas basically underlined HR Giger's inspiration and the demon-themed works portraying the Elder/Older Ones soon meshed with sci-fi biomechanics gadgets and supernatural/alien beings in his paintings...
"He is our latter-day Hieronymus Bosch, the Dutch fabulist come again, demonic and erotic." - Harlan Ellison
HR Giger's Necronomicon was mainly inspired by the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft... Indeed, it was Lovecraft's literary weirdness which fuelled HR GIGER throughout his life - especially the idea of the 'GREAT OLD ONES' which are demonic spiritual entities which share characteristics similar to the demons of the GOETIA. The term "Old Ones" is employed in various contexts by various authors - and many of these Goetia-demonic-orientated projects have inspired HOLLYWOOD HORROR MOVIES... Lovecraft's first mention of the Old Ones appears in "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926), where he uses the term in reference to a group of primordial beings entombed in the mythical city of R'lyeh. At one point in the story, Inspector John Legrasse of the New Orleans police department raids a cult ritual gathering, capturing several of its members:
They worshipped, so they said, the "Great Old Ones" who are demonic entities authored by HP Lovecraft - yes, these were inventions of HP Lovecraft, but based on real-life books of demonological entities... These "Great Old Ones" lived long before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky - this singular motif of fiction spawned an entire new industry which today we call 'science fiction'....
HP Lovecraft's central idea was that those 'Old Ones' lived inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died... Of course this in turn inspired a whole weird hotch potch of cults - and some of HP Lovecraft's greatest admirers went on to become sadist grand wizards...
In Lovecraft's novella At the Mountains of Madness (1936), the "Old Ones" was another name for a fictional alien species, the Elder Things - and it was this particular tranche of fiction which captivated HR Giger's imagination beyond all others.
These Elder Things creatures were said to have built cities around the world in ancient times, but were eventually relegated to Antarctica. At the end of their reign, they were all but destroyed by the shoggoths, a slave race of their own creation... This parallels the ancient mythology taken up later by sic-fi fake-historian Zechariah Sitchin with his mythos of the Annunaki...
This HP Lovecraft set of works and ideas basically underlined HR Giger's inspiration and the demon-themed works portraying the Elder/Older Ones soon meshed with sci-fi biomechanics gadgets and supernatural/alien beings in his paintings...