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Lynch’s first full-length feature, which is in part about the paralyzing fears of child-rearing, could be described as both a difficult birth and a labor of love. After five years of erratic production schedules and troubled financing, Eraserhead reached the midnight-movie circuit in 1977, where it gradually won a cult following. The film focuses on the strange and banal Henry Spencer as he discovers that his on-off girlfriend is pregnant. Once the baby is born, the film descends into a Kafkaesque nightmare rife with humor and despair. With the help of a malevolent-sounding ambient soundtrack, Eraserhead builds a dystopian landscape that mirrors Spencer’s fraught relationship with everyone and everything around him.

Among Eraserhead’s many admirers was none other than Stanley Kubrick, who appropriated a great deal from Lynch’s film for his own horror masterpiece, 1980’s The Shining. The latter uses the same relentless background noise and lingering shots to build a sense of dread that eventually crescendos into a fever dream of madness. Even The Shining’s famous “Room 237” is a not-so-subtle allusion to Spencer’s sultry neighbor’s apartment room 27. In The Shining as in Eraserhead, sex masquerades as an escape but ultimately propels its central character further into his downward spiral.

Beyond its outsize impact on The Shining, Eraserhead may also be responsible for an entire subgenre: body horror, which focuses on the deterioration of the body by showing it in various states of decay or mutilation. In its visceral investigation into the anxieties of caring for a newborn, Eraserhead was one of the first films to portray the human body as something frightening and repellent, not to be nurtured but rather feared. Spencer’s vile offspring is only the most overt instance of body horror in the film; the title, after all, alludes to a dream sequence in which Spencer is decapitated and his head is used to create erasers at a pencil factory. This simultaneous fascination and repulsion with the human body and its infinite variety of deconstructions would go on to inform the work of David Cronenberg and Clive Barker in films like The Fly, Videodrome, and Hellraiser.

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Coming on the heels of Lynch’s infamous commercial flop, Dune, 1986’s Blue Velvet marked the director's return to personal, idiosyncratic storytelling. Telling the story of a clean-cut college kid (Kyle MacLachlan) who slips ever deeper into the sadistic underbelly of his sleepy North Carolina town, Blue Velvet received the kind of wildly polarizing reception reserved only for the most provocative films. The film was immediately derided by many as filthy and misogynistic (nuns from the actress Isabella Rossellini’s Catholic high school called her to let her know they were praying for her daily). Meanwhile, several critics, including Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers, called it the best film of the decade.