When I put this movie on the list, I was only 50% sure it was a scary movie. Now I’m 100% sure.
I mean. It’s not a “horror” movie, exactly. But it did scare me. It’s off-putting, it’s gruesome, it makes you think, “What does it all mean?” And nothing is scarier than that.
When I used to think of Eraserhead, I thought of the above gif. That’s literally all I knew about it. Crazy hair, dust flying everywhere.
Eraserhead tells the story of Henry Spencer, who goes to dinner at his girlfriend’s house and finds out that she had a baby. Well… a creature.
It looks like if ET and The Thing had a baby. Henry and his wife move into Henry’s gross apartment and try to raise this thing together.
That’s his girlfriend on the left.
But this is David Lynch! Not Knocked Up! Not Juno! This is actually David Lynch’s first film, which he made while he was a student at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. So it features some serious surrealism.
The line between reality and dreams is irrelevant, and the film travels between the two many times. The sound actually does a lot to blur the distinction, with an industrial soundtrack that works to make the whole experience of watching even more haunting. Lynch has said that he was inspired by the darker parts of Philadelphia to create this atmosphere, since he partly grew up there.
One of Spencer’s main dreams is of “Lady in the Radiator,” who sings songs while also stomping on sperm-like creatures.
Sometimes I get frustrated when movies don’t make sense to me, but I did like this one. It’s very unnerving, which I can tell is what it intends to be. It sets out to make me feel something and it succeeds.
Eraserhead played at midnight showings for years, and praise for it started off small but only grew overtime. It now has a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, and it helped launch Lynch’s career as the preeminent surrealist director of modern film. So go watch it!
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