(Credits: Far Out / Museum HR Giger / Kedar Misani)
Fri 24 April 2026 8:00, UK
You can thank Swiss artist HR Giger for unleashing on the world cinema’s greatest ever monster to haunt the silver screen.
It’s hard to overstate just what an impact Alien made on movie audiences back in 1979. Draped in director Ridley Scott’s thick and claustrophobic atmosphere, the sci-horror’s detailing of the Nostromo spaceship crew’s encounter with a hostile extraterrestrial owed everything to Giger’s conceptual vision. A humanoid mass of biomechanical threat with a phallic head and slavering double-jaw, the creature’s Lovecraftian lurk among the industrial crevices of the ore refinery still looks captivatingly terrifying nearly 50 years on.
It was all there in Necronom IV. The original precursor to the alien’s eventual realisation, Giger’s airbrushed nightmares of ghoulishly enmeshed flesh and metal, packed with sexual and violent undercurrents, offered Scott and the team the chance to make an unforgettable mark on the age-old movie monster picture. Giger’s work, however thrilling Alien is, can often veer into the tacky.
There’s brilliance, from the early Dune concept art for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s doomed adaptation to Dead Kennedys’ self-sodomising poster with 1985’s Frankenchrist, then there’s the daft end like the schlocky Species designs and a slew of rubbish album covers, Debbie Harry’s KooKoo and Steve Stevens’ Atomic Playboys, the worst offenders.
Still, when hitting that surreal bullseye, Giger could excavate magic from his uniquely dark ether. Could such unsettling flair extend to a drinking establishment? He’d tried once before. A Giger Bar was attempted in Tokyo in the late 1980s, but was disavowed by the artist when, to his horror, the production team had designed the interior based on preliminary sketches over his final submissions. Giger ensured any future bar wouldn’t make the same mistake.
First officially opening its doors in 1992 in his hometown of Chur, then another in Gruyères, Switzerland, attached with his bespoke museum in 2003, Giger truly unveiled his authorised bars befitting his exact architectural supervision.
Painted in his signature monochrome colours, bony spines seem to sprout from the floor, acting as the supporting column to both the building and the strange colossal entity you’re sat in the belly of, sipping a pale ale. Elsewhere, Giger’s disquieting ‘baby wall’ can be spotted in full physical manifestation, as well as the high-backed Harkonnen Chairs from his Dune concepts.
The Giger Bars may well try to promote the ostensible cerebral underpinnings to the whole affair, “the symbiosis of man and machine into new forms of being,” but it’s probably best enjoyed as a novel bit of escapist fun, an extravagant environment in the tradition of Montmartre’s famously demonic interior to the Cabaret de L’Enfer’s hellish cabaret show.
Still, it’s a fitting legacy to Giger’s mark on the arts world. Never one to shy away with his creative stamp, enjoying a presence in the world of entertainment, his litany of video game commissions attests to, but a chance to grapple with his work up close and personal need not be diminished by having a beer or toastie in hand, or knocking back their specially branded absinthe for a little extra netherworld kick.
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