Importantly, Giger provided a connection for video game artists between the fantastical horror of HP Lovecraft and the science fiction visions of authors such as Arthur C Clarke and Robert Heinlein, and illustrators Chris Foss and Ralph McQuarrie. The first-person shooter Doom mixed demonic monsters with claustrophobic sci-fi environments, and Giger's weird organic interior designs doubtless inspired the game's miles of intestinal corridors and womb-like interiors. The anatomy of the creature depicted in Necronom IV was too incredible to become the movie’s antagonist, but it served as the direct first draft of the famous Xenomorph. The nightmarish fusion of human bodies with complex machinery – pipes, wires, pistons – is the main theme of the works in Necronomicon. His works inspired not only Alien, but also, to a larger or lesser extent, metal music, Hellraiser, the video-game Doom, cyberpunk, or Matrix – and those are only the most obvious examples.

R. Giger, psychologist Stanislav Grof notes that the artist develops a psychoanalytical view of the trauma related to leaving the “paradise” of a mother’s womb through the birth canal by adding a vision of further mechanical torture. The head, although still elongated, no longer resembled a penis – after all, the unfriendly alien was meant to be a character in a widely available movie. The depictions of danse macabre in the late-medieval period, the gothic novel, the literary works of the modernists, even occult rock from the 60s and 70s – even these few examples clearly show that death, decay, violence, and the macabre have always been both repulsive and alluring.The 12th century parish church in Paisley, Scotland, had undergone renovations in the 1990s, in which destroyed gargoyles were replaced by new sculptures. Although this book does not feature art of the quality of Necronomicon (generally featuring his best artwork in my opinion) or Necronomicon 2, Biomechanics rounds off Giger's most productive period from the late 60s to the late 80s. R. Giger Necronomicon – including Satan I, a painting depicting the titular Satan using the arms of the crucified Christ as a slingshot. The following year his first posters were published and he had his first exhibitions outside of Zurich. So, after all that, I looks it up after looking and reading it a bit; it's huge, got it's own case and everything.

R. Giger’s art point towards an interesting idea: everyone brought up in the Christian culture is used to depictions of a dying man, and one of the most important symbols of the western civilisation, the cross, is, in fact, a torture device. In it, reproduction is also connected with violence – not only towards the creature being birthed, as mentioned before, but also the one which gives birth and is therefore a “host”. We have to take into account, however, that the pop-culture which made us familiar with ugliness (and may have even bored us with it) owes its openness to anti-aesthetics in part to Giger. Contrary to the title and the book cover, references to the occult do not dominate the contents of Necronomicon.The metaphor of the body as a mechanism found its use in education, among others – for example, this illustration by the pioneer of infographics, Fritz Kahn, titled Der Mensch Als Industrielpalast (meaning Man As Industrial Palace ), was published in 1926. The rest of the creature’s anatomy is somewhat unclear – some of it is reminiscent of Cthulhu’s tentacles from Lovecraft’s mythology, while other fragments added to the body are mechanical.