David Lynch’s first feature film Eraserhead offers essential clues to understanding his cinema and finding one’s way through his unique world. Dreams, and of course nightmares, provide surreal imagery. With perhaps one or two exceptions, Eraserhead makes it clear that the rules of classical storytelling will not take you far when watching a David Lynch film. It is instead a journey into the unconscious, where one should not fear getting lost or confronting the uncanny.

The film takes its title from a nightmare experienced by the protagonist Henry, but in truth, the entire work is designed like a dream. The story can be summarized as the reluctant assumption of fatherhood by Henry, a timid man, and his attempt to escape from his premature baby, born sick and deformed. We watch the reflections of Henry’s increasingly bleak and disturbing mind as he struggles under the weight of being both a man and a father. The film’s unsettling effect is heightened not only by a visual world that never betrays its extremely modest budget, but also by an industrial sound design built on a relentless low-frequency hum, something cinema had never encountered until then.