Giger’s Necronomicon imagery comes alive on the screen.
By Sheldon Teitelbaum
There exists a universe a dimension apart yet only a whisper away from our own,..an ancient, evil civilization, a race of horrific living things spawned from the grotesque marriage of manand machine, Unable to reproduce, they have waited near death for eons for someone from our dimension to open the portal between their world and ours the mirror. The “Necronomicon™ the Book of the Dead, tells of a netherglass with the power to bend time and space... that 7000 years ago a secker of dark secrets found the mirror and fell through a hole in time. For centuries the glass was lost. Now the mirror has been found again. And soon their wait will be over. The human female specimen they need willbe theirs.
So reads the promo for THE MIRROR, a $6 million feature based upon the paintings in H. R. Giger’s Necronomicon, set to beginan Il-week production schedule in April. William Malone, its director, has assembled some of the best effects and design people in the business: Michael (FLIGHT OF THE NAVI- GATOR) Novotny as production designer; Robert and Dennis Skotak (ALIENS) incharge of special visual effects; Doug Beswick (STAR WARS, THE TERMINATOR, ALIENS) as special makeup effects man, and Giger himself, whom Malone persuaded to fly to Los Angeles to supervise overall conceptual design for the film.
And lest you have anydoubts about Malone's record—his last effort, CREATURE, did fall a bit short of being a genre tour de force—consider this: Giger was not at all pleased with the outcome of his most recent venture into filmmaking—the abortive POLTER- GEIST II. Intimates say that after that travesty, Giger intended never again to get suckered in by another slick Hollywood deal. In which case Malone must have shown him one hell ota hot script, because this is an independent production, and Malone doesn't have scads of money to salve Giger’s wounds from a botched construction job.
Indeed, the prospect of translating intact the acclaimed grotesqueries of The Necronomicon into three dimensional form was apparently impossible for cither the Swissartist or these other effects wizards to resist. Mention Giger, these people are cager. Explained art director Novotny: “How to invest the next year of your life is always a major decision. But when a project has the potential to bea knockout— Academy Award material—we're willing to take a stab at it.”
Malone described the project as “Alice Through the Looking Glass meets H. P. Lovecraft.” He wrote a first draft of the script in 1980, after finding a French edition of Giger’s Necronomicon in the dealers’ room at a science fiction convention, “It blew me away,” he said. “And later, when I heard he was doing Ridley Scott’s ALIEN, it was very easy to pick out what the alien was going to look like—there was only one suitable painting in the book.
“I think the stuffin ALIEN is the best of the film adaptations of Giger’s work,” Malone added. But he thinks Scott only scratched the surface. “Giger has a wealth of stuff—images even more powerful than those in ALIEN. It gets you on a primordial, gut level. His paintings are disturbing, but you keep wanting to look at them anyway. They are scary but also elegant. | kept going back to them, and the story just came to me.”
Malone’s story documents the travails of housewife July Daley, whom a race of Gigeresque bio-mechanical monstrosities haschosentospawna newly-invigorated race of human/ machine hybrids. Daley runs aground when she hangs an antique mirror on her wall that serves as a portal intotheir dimension. Much beasting about ensues as they try todrag her back to their home turf.
After Malone completed CREATURE for Moshe Diament’s Trans World Entertainment—the picture was made for $1.3 million and did $8 million theatrically and millions more in video—he took his script, then called DEADLY IMAGES, to Vista. “But they were going through a bunch of changes and, as it turned out, could only finance one picture. They did FRIGHT NIGHT instead, and threw us out the door.”
Later in1985, Malone met Jack Murphy, a Canadian producer who had handled the Canadian distribution of Malone’s first film, SCARED TO DEATH, in1979. Murphy, who had moved to Los Angeles three years earlier, enthusiastically embraced the project.
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Stillbirth Machine, a 1976 Giger painting trom his book Necronomicon, 4.5'x6.5', which serves as one of the preproduction images for the world of THE MIRROR.
Two Necronomicon paintings by Giger which serve as preproduction designs for the film imagery of THE MIRROR. Above: The Spell II, a1974 three-piece “environment,” measuring about8 feet by14 feet. Right: The way of the magician, one of four paintings in Giger’s The Passage Temple, with steps leading to godhood.