25 Amazing Concept Designs From Sci-Fi Movies In Development Hell

4. The Tourist

It's easy to declare any project which failed to get off the ground an "unfinished masterpiece", but with the science fiction project The Tourist (surely impossible to confuse with the 2010 dud starring Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie) this claim just might be close to the truth. Based on a screenplay from the early 1980s by Clair Noto, The Tourist tells of a group of aliens living out their lives on earth waiting to die, some disguised as humans, others in their natural form. It's the extraterrestrial visualisations which makes The Tourist such an appealing prospect - as anyone who has seen Alien can tell from a quick glance at these concept paintings, the twisted mind of H. R. Giger was brought in to create the look of the film.

As with many movies which find themselves languishing in the limbo of development hell, The Tourist's tortured road to production - and cancellation - was beset by script rewrites, financial cock-ups and the all-too-familiar clashing of competing egos. To make the prospects of The Tourist ever seeing the light of day even more slim, the film was intended to ride on the still-fluttering coattails of the European New Wave of cinema, echoing the ambiguous, experimental works of pioneers of the avante-garde such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Federici Fellini.

H. R. Giger's exceptional concept paintings certainly suggest a movie sitting a long way away from the mainstream end of the spectrum, replete with morbid (and often typically phallic, as you'd expect from the man who changed the shape of science fiction movies with his designs for Alien) monstrosities which wouldn't look out of place in a David Cronenberg movie. For fans of the grotesque and the macabre, it's a huge shame that The Tourist is unlikely to ever see the light of day, but at least these great images remain to illustrate what could have been.