Podcast Research – ‘Alien’ Design: From House Harkonnen to Huge Honkers

When you consider all of the movie projects over the years that have been floated and then sunk under the waves of failed financing, at the top of the list has to be Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ambitious attempt at bringing Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi book series Dune to the big screen. Here is the trailer for a 2014 documentary made about the famous failed movie production:

Several talented people were working to realize Jodorowsky’s vision in the mid-70’s, including eventual Alien screenplay writer Dan O’Bannon, and production designer Ron Cobb, who would populate the wretched Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars with its scummy and villainous creatures. Also helping with design was somebody we’ve heard a lot about around here lately, Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger. Tasked with creating the headquarters for House Harkonnen in Dune, this is the design he came up with:

As we know, the 70’s Dune project would eventually disappear into the annals of motion picture history, deemed too expensive to pull off at the time. A less expansive, more dodgy adaptation of Herbert’s work would end up being released in 1984, directed by David Lynch of Eraserhead and later TV’s Twin Peaks fame. After Dune‘s collapse, O’Bannon started work on his idea to expand his “alien on the loose” idea from Dark Star into its own film. While writing what would become Alien, O’Bannon sketched out the pyramid that the crew of the ship then called the Snark would discover on the stormy planetoid:

Enlisted to flesh out the look of the story’s world, Giger would take the mound shape of his Harkonnen Castle and, you guessed it, sexify the pyramid into a breast-shaped structure:

The sexual allegory falls in line with the concept from O’Bannon’s original screenplay, which emphasizes the idea that the indigenous creatures of planetoid LV-426 were so deeply obsessed with their procreation that they built a religion around it. Inside, the pyramid would be full of stage one of the alien’s life-cycle, the waiting pods containing the impregnating facehuggers. The ‘nipple’ atop the structure would allow the Snark crew to enter it, and when director Ridley Scott joined the production he drew the entrance in his storyboards for the film:

Scott would take the look of this entrance from another Giger painting, this one created in 1975 and called National Park. Here it is; you can spot the form of the entrance in the top right of the image:

So, Gentle Readers, advance your clocks ahead 33 years, and Ridley Scott has returned to the Alien universe in 2012 with his movie Prometheus. A crack team of scientists, bankrolled by Peter Wayland of Wayland Corp., has flown a spaceship to a new planetoid to seek out answers about Mankind’s origins. There, they come across several stone pyramids, which look startlingly familiar to us Alien aficionados:

You got it, the crowning structure atop the pyramids comes all the way from Giger’s House Harkonnen, made for Jodorowsky’s Dune. Here they are, compared. On the left, the face of the crowning element in Prometheus. On the right, the top of House Harkonnen:

Finally, Dr. Shaw’s perspective on the alien pyramid, in Prometheus: