Over half a century before the dark subculture of morbidly inclined teenagers began to flourish in America, a young boy in Switzerland named Hans Rudi Giger was building "ghost rides" in his cellar and drawing deformed children on calendar sheets . Before his time, this artist went against the crowd, daring to be himself and daring to be different. As an accomplished sixty one year old painter, sculptor, moviemaker, costume designer and scriptwriter Giger doesn't create art, he lives it. The always confident and eccentric Giger has been known to wear hollowed out loaves of bread on his feet calling them "shoes", and once dressed up a dog as a robotic monster, but he is most notorious for his masterpiece movie successes The Alien trilogy.
             As a young man Giger attended a myriad of art schools ranging from interior design to drawing schools, and he even attended a military college once. He started to create tables and masks in 1964, also the year his ink drawings began to be published in underground magazines. He was working a full-time furniture design job for designer Andreas Christen when he fell "madly in love" with an attractive actress named Li Tober in 1966 . In 1967 they moved into a vacant apartment next door to a condemned house, which proved to be the first of several "condemned" houses Giger would live in or near by in his lifetime. Nine years after moving in with Giger, Li shot herself in the head, leaving Giger in the clutches of despair .
             Throughout the sixties Giger remained very active in the art world, never taking a break. Friends helped him promote his galleries and films and he quickly became very well known and respected in the business. In 1970 Giger was inspired by his first of many horror nightmares to paint a series of paintings called the "wet-cell" paintings. Some of his paintings in this era had the haunting illusion that they are covered with skin.
             In 1977 Giger made his first trip to Ame...