Our primitive, prescientific language contains few words accurate enough to communicate the scary, awesome facts this artist Giger reveals. Giger, you slice through my tissues into thin microscopic slides for the world to see. Giger, you razor-shave sections of my brain and plaster them still pulsing across your canvas. Giger, you are an alien lurking inside my body, laying your futique eggs of wonder. You have wound silken threads of larval cocoon around you and tunnelled down deep into my wisdom gland. Giger, you see more then we domesticated primates.
~ ~ Timothy Leary, June, 1981

Swiss surrealist artist, sculptor and filmmaker H.R. (Hans Ruedi) Giger is known to audiences worldwide for the 'biomechanoid' designs featured prominently in the films Alien (1979), Poltergeist 2: The Other Side (1986), Alien 3 (1992), Species (1995) and Alien Resurrection (1997). His dark and otherworldly visions have been compared to Salvador Dali and Alexandro Jodorowsky, with whom Giger collaborated on an unfilmed version of Frank Herbert's masterpiece Dune (1976).

Giger's troubled relationship with Hollywood studios who have ripped off his designs has obscured fruitful collaborations with musicians such as Deborah Harry, Celtic Frost, and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. Through a series of memorable folios, notably Necronomicon 1 (1977), Giger's Alien (1980), Necronomicon 2 (1985), Biomechanics (1985), ARH+ (1991) and www.HRGiger.com (1997), Giger created a trademark aesthetic that has influenced occult artists including Diabolos Rex Church, Timothy Patrick Butler, and private rituals conducted by the Church of Satan and the Temple of Set. Giger's collaboration with Akron on Baphomet, the Tarot of the Underworld (1993) resulted in a powerful chthonic reworking of tarot card imagery.

According to transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof, the allure of Giger's artwork is due to his extensive exploration of the human psyche's inner cartography. In books such as Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death and Transcendence in Psychotherapy (New York: State University Of New York Press, 1985) which explore how 'perinatal' experiences (occuring during or after birth) shape our consciousness and meta-symbol systems, Grof's Basic Perintal Matrices (BPM) model outlines the connections between Giger's otherworldly imagery and the apocalyptic fusion of aggression, death, and sexuality of the pre-birth intra-uterine environment and passage through the birth canal. Claims of blasphemy against Giger ignore the biological basis of his motifs, and the possibility for personal transcendence via "demonic beauty."

Giger's strange insectoid art-work also represents the evolutionary legacy of our collective unconsciousness, and must also be re-evaluated with the successful genome sequencing of the Drosophila melanogaster fruit fly by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory staff, according to the journal Science (March 24th, 2000). Barbara R. Jasny and Floyd E. Bloom note (p. 2157) that, "the similarities between Drosophila genes and genes involved in human physiological processes and disease are staggering."