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Movie: Eraserhead

Date: 1977

Category: Weird

Director: David Lynch

Big Stars: Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Allen Joesph

Is it a dream or nightmare or the vision of one man's world when evryone and everything is out of place? Mullholland Drive and Twin Peaks director David Lynch says he doesn't even know. His first film is a masterpiece of the macbre and grotesque made as a reaction to Lynch's discovery he would soon be a father. So, Lynch's Eraserhead follows Henry (Nance), a sensitive young man coping with his new parenting responsibilities. Pretty common and straightforward theme, huh? Um, no.

Henry lives in a hopeless industrial landscape, bleached of people and life. He lusts after the lady across the hall. After his girlfriend, Mary (Stewart), informs him of her pregnancy, he is forced to eat a weird chicken (?) dinner with her extremely odd family. The baby is eventually born, only it isn’t a human baby at all; it’s a deformed creature that resembles a lizard. The baby won’t stop crying, a horrifyingly piercing wail that drives Mary insane. Left alone with the baby. Henry is then serenaded by a woman who lives inside his radiator. Then, the movie really gets strange.

Surreal and and unnerving, Eraserhead has all the trademarks of a Lynch film---haunting visuals, an etheral score, unsettling sound design, shifts in direction, and most notably, a black sense of humor.