"Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility."
January 2, 2014 12:37 PM   Subscribe

Slate visits the H.R. Giger Museum in Gruyères, Switzerland (Official museum website).
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI (16 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
Gruyères? Emmental? Any Norwegian Jarlsberger, per chance?
posted by Melismata at 1:00 PM on January 2, 2014 [2 favorites]


Whatever the case, that barroom floor's got to be a bitch to mop at the end of the night.

The encrusted filth of generations trampled underfoot is a feature, not a bug.
posted by Runcible! at 1:01 PM on January 2, 2014 [4 favorites]


Next to Ripley's Believe It Or Not museum.
posted by hal9k at 1:04 PM on January 2, 2014 [1 favorite]


needs more Brain Salad Surgery
posted by philip-random at 1:05 PM on January 2, 2014


Yeah, so… I was expecting, hm, more words?
posted by dominik at 1:10 PM on January 2, 2014 [1 favorite]


No throne of human skulls?!
posted by indubitable at 1:16 PM on January 2, 2014


At the end of the night, you don't clean the barroom floor; it shambles out, clatters down stone steps to a black pool, dives in, and cleans itself by scraping its skin with bone shards.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 1:40 PM on January 2, 2014 [10 favorites]


I haven't been on any sort of vacation in like 4 years. I'm thinking I might've found a place.
posted by nevercalm at 1:40 PM on January 2, 2014


I have been there. It is as bizarre as you'd think.

Imagine if someone picked a picture perfect gemutlich village with the cheese and the surrounding buttercup valleys and the cobbled streets and the smiling friendly swiss neat people serving cheese curdOMYGOD WHY IS A SUCCUBUS EATING THE ENSLAVED HUMAN HYBRID CYBORGS BRAIN WHILE BEING SPINALLY PENETRATED BY THE SELFSAME CYBORGS ROBOPHALLUS?
posted by lalochezia at 1:49 PM on January 2, 2014 [8 favorites]


No throne of human skulls?!

Well, there is the design for Baron Harkonnen's chair that David Lynch foolishly discarded when he took over the stalled Dune project.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 1:51 PM on January 2, 2014 [2 favorites]


The encrusted filth of generations trampled underfoot is a feature, not a bug.

The bugs are also features.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:57 PM on January 2, 2014 [9 favorites]


lalochezia's description is spot-on. Remind yourself to look up, also. If you are outside you see very nice hills and mountains in the distance. If you are inside, well, I would not want to spoil that for you...!
posted by whatzit at 2:15 PM on January 2, 2014


The bugs are the featured special.
posted by arcticseal at 3:24 PM on January 2, 2014 [3 favorites]


If you haven't heard them, the Superego H.R. Giger bits are grand. "I grow black leaves"
posted by jeribus at 3:37 PM on January 2, 2014 [2 favorites]


There are some good shots of the museum in this documentary.

Giger is not the only artist capable of tapping the darker aspects of the human psyche so sympathetically, but is perhaps the most consistently prolific.
posted by walrus at 4:12 AM on January 3, 2014


Is it just me, or does the museum (what few images there are of it) look really small and cramped and overfilled with stuff?

That said, I'd definitely go if I were in the area.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 8:42 AM on January 3, 2014


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