While tidy Alpine meadows, luxury watches, and foil-wrapped chocolate bars feature strongly – correctly – in most people’s idea of Switzerland, there’s also a surprisingly weirder, darker side that has inspired horror and psychological exploration for centuries.
Switzerland’s long history of the dark and supernatural starts way, way back. According to legend, in the nooks and crannies of our postcard-perfect mountains live folk creatures who could be helpful to humans, but also mischievous or worse. For example, there are the Barbegazi, high-altitude skiing gnomes, or the Stollenwurm, a two-metre-long snake with stubby legs and cat-like face and poisonous breath. There are also nasty little night demons that inspire bad dreams by sitting on sleepers’ chests, most memorably evoked by Swiss painter Henry Fuseli in his famous 1781 painting The Nightmare.
The Swiss landscape, with its mix of beauty and terror that the Romantics called the sublime, has also proved the perfect backdrop for tales of monsters and madness – and horror fiction’s greatest origin story. In 1816, a group of English writers including Mary Shelley (whose mother, the philosopher and writer Mary Wollstonecraft, had once had an affair with the painter Fuseli), Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori holed up in Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva during a freakishly cold, bleak summer. The wild weather and brooding mountains inspired them to write spooky stories. From these dark and stormy nights emerged both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s novella The Vampyre, literature’s first vampire story. Both created templates for the horror fiction of the next two centuries.
In the 20th century, Switzerland was also the location for psychologists to explore humanity’s often dark depths through the psychology of the unconscious mind. Zürich-born psychologist Hermann Rorschach invented his famous inkblot tests to test for schizophrenia. Meanwhile, Carl Jung, from the Swiss canton of Thurgau, developed a unique understanding of humanity’s dark side through his concept of the Shadow. Jung saw our darker impulses as a vital part of our psyche that demanded acknowledgment. For Jung, the Shadow contained not only our personal darkness, but connected to a collective unconscious filled with primal fears and drives, some of the same that find expression as myths and folktales, in stories, for example, of gnomes and giant serpents and night demons. Jung suggested that true psychological health meant confronting these shadows rather than denying them.
One Swiss artist with zero qualms about confronting this dark side is H.R. Giger. Born in Chur, he is the creator of perhaps the most terrifying film monster ever: the xenomorph from the 1979 deep space horror flick Alien. With its freakish oblong head, exposed skeletal structure, acidic blood and multiple sets of jaws, it is truly a creature of nightmares. And that’s not counting its other fearsome phases of life, first as a face-hugging egg layer and then as a “chestbusting” embryo. Giger’s dark biomechanical vision was first compiled in his 1977 book Necronomicon, and when Alien screenwriter Dan O’Brien shared the book with the film’s director, Ridley Scott, Scott immediately knew Giger was the key to bringing his alien to awful life. Though Giger died in 2014, his creation lives on through numerous sequels and spinoffs in the Alien franchise, while his art continues to inspire film, music, and tattoo artists around the world.
Although Giger’s futuristic biomechanical nightmare may seem a long way from folkloric gnomes and night demons, they’re part of a uniquely Swiss tradition of imaginatively bringing some of spookiest fears to light. Yes, Switzerland is home to much lighter-hearted creations like the cuckoo clock, milk chocolate, and the Helvetica typeface. But the country that also brought you Dadaism and LSD also knows that may be something just a little weirder hiding in the shadow of a mountain peak – or buried in our psyche.