The Cinematheque

“The images are so alien and frightening, yet so rapturously beautiful, that you feel as if you’re glimpsing the primal id of cinema … It’s clearly the work of an original and almost spookily confident talent.”

Chuck Bowen, Slant Magazine

David Lynch’s hair-hoisting first feature is one of those rare movies that genuinely seems to have spilled directly out of the unconscious mind—unmediated, unadulterated, and ​“carrying bits of brain tissue with it” (Film Comment). Shot on a shoestring, and taking five years to complete, Lynch’s grisly comedy is set in a god-awful industrial wasteland where hapless factory worker Henry (Jack Nance) learns from girlfriend Mary (Charlotte Stewart) that he has become a father to a child quite unlike any other. The film serves up a Lynchian nightmare vision of love, sex, parenthood, and the nuclear family, rendered in remarkably textured black-and-white images and startling, unsettling sound. A midnight-movie paragon of the ​’70s and cult classic ever since, Eraserhead marked the emergence of a once-in-a-generation artist who would arguably never again harvest so completely from his inner world.

“[A] demented and beautiful masterpiece … One of the most naked and horrifying self-portraits ever conceived by a filmmaker.”

John Patterson, The Guardian