News has surfaced that cult film special effects master Roger Dicken, known for his work on Ridley Scott’s iconic 1979 pic Alien, has died. The 84-year-old artist passed away February 18 at his home in North Wales.
Born in Portsmouth, England in 1939, Dicken’s career started off with a bang, as the young sculptor crafted moon terrain for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The same year saw the release of the Vincent Price historical horror Witchfinder General and Peter Cushing vampire tale The Blood Beast Terror, which Dicken also contributed special effects work to. He returned to Nosferatu territory for Scars of Dracula (1970), starring Christopher Lee.
His next major credit was on Val Guest’s When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), which earned Dicken and Jim Danforth a shared nomination for the Academy Award for Best Special Visual Effects. He went on to oversee the dinosaur sequences for The Land That Time Forgot (1974) as well as scaly sea creatures for Warlords of the Deep (a.k.a. Warlords of Atlantis), released in 1978.
In 1979, a generation of moviegoers were on the edge of their seats witnessing Ridley Scott’s gritty, gory vision of the space age in Alien. Dicken was responsible for creating and controlling the “chestburster” alien spawn, working with creature designer H.R. Giger. (Alien won the 1980 VFX Oscar, although Dicken was not among the co-recipients.)
Dicken continued to work into the early ’80s, handling prosthetics for White Dog (1982) and wrangling the monkey effects in Tony Scott’s The Hunger, starring Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie and Susan Sarandon.
[H/T Deadline]
