David Lynch’s debut feature started as a student project in 1970 and ended up being one of the defining midnight movies during the heyday of that subculture in the late-’70s. Under its thick layer of industrial grime and nightmare-fuel imagery, it’s also simply one of the best ever movies about becoming a parent, tapping into that fugue state of sleep deprivation and crippling anxiety like no other movie before or since.
This surrealist body horror classic follows Henry Spencer (Lynch favorite Jack Nance) as he and his girlfriend, Mary, and their newborn baby (a disconcerting and alarmingly fragile mutant-rabbit chimera thing) move into an apartment in an industrial cityscape. Henry is tasked with the child’s care and soon after starts experiencing visions, hallucinations, nightmares, and various distractions, most memorably a chipmunk-cheeked performer in his radiator who sings a show-stopping rendition of “In Heaven” complete with stopped fetuses.
Looking at it now, you can see that this haunted nocturnal odyssey is a deeply personal film for Lynch, drawing on the complications surrounding his daughter Jennifer’s birth as well as the violent neighborhood of Philadelphia where he lived. With its mesmerizing black-and-white photography by Frederick Elmes and Herbert Cardwell, evocative sound design, and unforgettably enigmatic performance by Nance, Eraserhead is essentially the American cult movie.