The Prince Of Darkness returns to the Alien franchise for Ridley Scott's much-anticipated sequel...

Great news for Alien franchise purists, as Alien conceptual artist H.R. Giger has been confirmed as a contributor to the prequel that Ridley Scott is set to begin shooting in February. The originator of the 'xenomorph' design, Giger was left out of James Cameron's Aliens (1986), since Cameron only needed a new 'Alien queen' design, and had come up with that himself. The eccentric Swiss artist participated as a conceptual designer for David Fincher's Alien 3 (1992) - though by this time he had long-abandoned the elaborate airbrush techniques that made him famous via the coffee-table book Necronomicon, which inspired ex-Dune (the abandoned 1977 Jodorowsky version) collaborator and Alien screenwriter Dan O'Bannon to suggest his work to Ridley Scott for Alien (1979). Instead Giger faxed pastel and chalk sketches to the Alien 3 production office, unwilling to once again face his fear of travel (and especially air-travel) as he had done to move to England as a resident designer for Alien throughout that film's production in 1978-79.

Controversy emerged among Giger fans when the theatrical release of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Alien: Resurrection (1997) failed to even acknowledge Giger's contribution in the credits - though this was amended for subsequent home video releases.

The new prequel, apparently titled Alien Paradise, focuses strongly on the 'space jockey' race featured in one famous and rather archeological sequence from Ridley Scott's SF horror masterpiece. Since this particular iteration of the creature seems to have been genetically engineered to operate some kind of space telescope/cannon, there's a lot of work to be done envisioning how a 'normal' member of this alien race might look, function and move.

The news was broken by Giger's wife in the below-linked (Swiss-only) TV broadcast.

Alien conceptual art by H.R. Giger, 1977-78:

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