Dark Star: HR Giger's World (2015)

I was given a normal childhood in the 1970s. I had no shortage of playmates, toys and an imagination undistracted by text messaging or video games. I spent summer afternoon running under the sprinklers, pretending I was a unicorn. But I also took my favorite teddy bear out into the backyard during an autumn thunderstorm and tried to bring it to life a la Frankenstein. My Barbie Dolls were wrapped in toilet paper and propelled through the air while I made ghostie "ooooOOOOooooo" noises. When I wasn't using the backyard as a mad scientist laboratory, I was burying matchbox coffins containing the corpses of insects beneath Popsicle cross-markers. I had friends, but was happy being alone as well. I was normal, but I was also weird. I had a darkness in me, one that I hadn't asked for but wasn't repulsed by. I was drawn to horror movies, Halloween decorations, skeletons and skulls, all things dark and fearful. Nobody worried about me or wanted me put on anti-psychotic medications. I wasn't hurting anyone or anything. The insects I buried were already dead when I found them. Killing them never occurred to me, because that wasn't natural. I knew the difference between right and wrong. One can be morbid without being twisted.

And so I'd like to believe that I would have gotten along quite well with the late Swiss artist H.R. Giger, a man who started out life as every child does: a bit fearful of the unknown, in awe of the specter of death, but embracing them nevertheless because he recognized their importance, their place in the natural order of things.

But the fear was there too, the driving force behind his art. Much like Lovecraft, who suffered from night terrors as a child, carried by Night Gaunts into twisted worlds of Elder Gods whose sole amusement was to torture the children of men, Giger was plagued by dream visions of monsters, machines and alien beings reaching out to him from some primal dimension that very few are unfortunate enough to glimpse during their short lifetimes. Listening to Giger and his closest friends recount his harrowing nightmares - the ones that drove him up out of sleep and sent him reaching for the notepad he kept by his pillow to document what he'd seen, and would later transfer to canvas, life sized and sanity-shattering - scared the hell out of me. They scared Giger too. He painted them because he was frightened of them, and recreating them seemed to be the only way to gain some kind of control over them. Makes me wonder, though - what the hell were Giger and Lovecraft tapping into? What other worlds are out there? And what's waiting for us beyond this one, squirming in the darkness and coiling around the doorways, waiting for us to wander stray?

But the documentary Dark Star: HR Giger's World doesn't spend its entire running time wallowing in morbid pessimism. Giger wasn't some arrogant Goblin King sitting on a throne in his Alien bar, demanding homage. He was just a diminutive, soft spoken guy fussing over his beloved cat Muggi and taking dinner with his friends in a crowded kitchen. Often he seems overwhelmed by it all, shutting his eyes briefly or staring off into space as if willing himself away from this ridiculous spotlight of fame. He seems utterly unimpressed with himself. He's only spent his life doing what he must, what comes naturally, and the adoration he receives from his fans and lifelong admirers never acts as a steroid applied to his ego. We get to meet his parents through kodachrome photographs. We wind our way through his cluttered house, which narrowly misses being the refuge of a hoarder. We are taken to the mist shrouded Alps to visit his ex-wife, with whom he remains on friendly terms. There's nothing very Hollywood going on here. For Christs sake, the guy had a toy train in his backyard that wound through his gardens and sculptures, and which he rides with all of the enthusiasm of a sugar-high child. It's difficult to be an arrogant asshole when your seventy year old plus sized body is crammed atop a toy train.

But with its mournful soundtrack and hypnotic imagery, no one who has embraced the dark and seen its beauty will want to miss this documentary, now streaming on Netflix. It's a gorgeous, unspooling ribbon of velvet gothic blackness and shining chrome biomechanics. And it's also just the simple tale of a nice old man who only ever wanted to draw what he dreamt. It's a rare thing to be afforded a glimpse into the mind of an artist or a genius...or was he simply a conduit and an emissary?