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In the series Hallowed Grounds, we revisit some of the greatest auteur-driven classics of modern horror history that have influenced the current crop of horror movies terrorizing audiences today.

Long before retro-inspired horrors like It Follows and Stranger Things peeled back the dirty fingernails of the American suburbs, David Lynch was electrifying television screens with Twin Peaks, his irresistible nightmare about the "little girl from down the lane." Laura Palmer, the beautiful, tormented, devastating, seething, rage-fire hero of the series, seemed to both set flame to the tired fantasy of the Hitchcock Blonde while also seeking to absolve the sins of corrupted youth.

But much like the Netflix's smash hit Stranger Things and its obsession with lost children (which is no doubt deeply indebted to Lynch), Lynch's Twin Peaks TV series was built upon the absence of Laura Palmer. That's what made Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the feature film that served as a prequel to the cancelled show (Lynch announced it's upcoming production just a month after Twin Peaks ended), such an anticipated event. With Sheryl Lee reprising her role, Lynch promised to explore the events leading up to the death of her mystifying character, Laura Palmer.

And explore it he did—just not in the soft and pudgy, fuzzy-wuzzy, "everything’s going to be okay because we’re best friends" sort of safe-zone storytelling that Stranger Things would employ to dumb-down the genre and hypnotize mainstream audiences some 30 years later.

New Line Cinema

In spite of resembling all the risky, adventurous, auteur-driven indie horror darlings that have gained widespread acclaim today, Fire Walk With Me turned out to be one of the most legendary disasters in cinema history when it was released in 1992. Famously booed at its premiere at Cannes, Quentin Tarantino later said that "David Lynch had disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different." But in the age of the ever-popular apologist essays , the film is getting a resurgence; especially in light of Lynch’s recent fuck-all-conventions, kaleidoscopic, 18-hour art-film / Showtime series Twin Peaks: The Return—which garnered thunderous acclaim and even some Emmy nominations—it’s time we pull back the curtains at Glastonbury Grove and submit Fire Walk With Me to the horror film White Lodge where it really belongs.

With Fire Walk With Me, David Lynch reminded the world that it’s poetry he’s making here, not popcorn.

It Follows and The Witch, two marvelous, expectation-defying visions of horror that have manifested in the past five years, center themselves around girls at the tail-end of adolescence. Both films explore the first fiery embers of womanhood, toiling in the red-hot waters of fresh sexuality, where the ever-expanding abyss of the unknown grows ever closer to making first contact with the temptations and curiosities of an uninitiated youth. But while The Witch divulges the terror of sexual maturity through the family-splintering conspiracies of witchcraft and It Follows sees it through the real-life anxieties of sexually transmitted disease and trauma, Fire Walk With Me goes a step further to look eye to eye with the blackened pupils of demonic possession—a thematic stand-in for the abuse that Laura Palmer must face.

New Line Cinema

Victimized young women are an incredibly overwrought topic in horror films, but Fire Walk With Me engages with the psychological onslaught of the senses that is stirred by trauma in such a furious, intimate way that, for those of us who have digested the film again and again, the simple act of looking at a framed image of Laura Palmer can send electricity up our spinal cords. Part of what seemed to malign mainstream viewers at the time is the harsh, devastatingly traumatic realities of incestuous abuse that Lynch poured into the open wounds of this film, warping a franchise that, for casual fans, was more a quirky soap opera about high-school necking and and a pulpy murder investigation.



Unlike Stranger Things—which left behind all the challenging, expectation-rewiring breakthroughs of Twin Peaks in favor of its more fun-loving, sleepover vibes—Fire Walk With Me feels like a battle cry for the renegade director, who seemed bored (or perhaps burdened) by the friendly reputation he’d gained from the ABC show at the time. With Fire Walk With Me, Lynch reminded the world that it’s poetry he’s making here, not popcorn.

For years I’ve tried to find explanations for why the films of David Lynch take hold of me, and how a scattered patchwork of barely temporal events like the jarring sequences presented in Fire Walk With Me can jam my frontal lobe and leave me gazing up at the ceiling above my bed, listening to the faint hum of a far-off electric generator for hours on end. People like to say that Lynch’s films exist in the world of dreams, but, like The Witch, his movies are less interested in the surreal and more concerned with the darkness that lives, breathes, and breeds beneath our reality.

New Line Cinema

Toward the end of grade school, I recall a surge of interest in speaking backwards. Kids began recording their voices on old eMac units in the computer lab, and then playing the backwards voices forward to hear what sounded like a demonic version of themselves phoning in from another dimension. We discovered songs with funny hidden messages like Queen’s "Another One Bites The Dust" (it’s fun to smoke marijuana), but also scary ones like "Stairway to Heaven," which reverse-speaks the words, "here's to my sweet Satan."

When we told our parents, though, we were warned about speaking backwards. They said the Devil spoke in reverse, and that there are satanic incantations in backwards talk. I feel the bugs crawl up my back just remembering this. The concept that demons were hiding in plain sight—that even in an innocent conversation, Satan was sitting there with you at the dinner table—this is the sort of deep, dark, down-to-the-bone-marrow torment David Lynch relishes, and repeats. Revisiting the film today, Fire Walk With Me makes Stranger Things look like Even Stevens.

Dom Nero Video Editor Dom Nero is a staff video editor at Esquire, where he also writes about film, comedy, and video games.

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