Halloween 2015 #10: Eraserhead (1977) - David Lynch

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!

Halloween 2015 #5 - The Thing (1982) - John Carpenter

A lot of famous horror movies have vague titles, The Omen, Scream, Halloween, Psycho, but The Thing probably takes the cake. 

As horror movies tend to celebrate or analyze “otherness,” what’s more frightening than something you can’t even really describe? It hunts humans, yet it also lives among them. They were right to use flame throwers!

The Thing follows an American research station in Antartica. In the first scene, an Alaskan malamute runs into the camp, being followed by a distressed Norwegian with a gun. As Americans are wont to do, they shoot the Norwegian in the face.

But this dog did not come to make friends. It soon becomes apparent that it isn’t really a dog at all.

Poor dog. Just before, a couple of the Americans went over to the Norwegian side of Antartica and found their camp destroyed and the burnt remains of creature lying in the snow. What would you do? Take it back to your own camp of course!

The Thing makes an insane use of practical effects as this unexplained life form shows off its ability to devour and then transform into any of its victims. The film soon becomes an exploration of paranoia. Anyone could be the Thing. The impending darkness that is an Antarctic winter highlights the claustrophobic feeling of being trapped in a building with an intelligent, carnivorous creature. It’s part Alien (1979), part Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). 

One of the only comic relief moments is when the head of one of their buddies turns into a giant spider and tries to sneak out of the room unnoticed.

Kurt Russell as the helicopter pilot, MacReady, acts as our pillar of logic in this terrifying adventure. We trust him so much, that I really think the movie missed an opportunity by not having him be The Thing in the end. Although… it is ambiguous… oh my god maybe he was The Thing!

In this scene, he holds a flare to a dynamite because all of the others are convinced that he is the Thing. But they later prove who is and who isn’t with an intense blood test, and at least up until that moment, we can be sure he isn’t.

No one wants to be tied up next to the Thing.

But Kurt Russell is weirdly attractive here as our scotch-drinking hero. He just looks sensitive with that beard.

The Thing was released the exact same day as Blade Runner in 1982, and debuted #8 at the box office. Thanks to a cult following and a re-evaluation from critics, it is now considered a classic horror film, and is currently ranked at #168 on the IMDb Top 250. The director, John Carpenter, is also famous for launching the Halloween franchise in 1978.