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Crazy film…It’s like performing a surgery on your brain, inserting some foreign tissues.. I never meant it in a negative sense. Pictures such as this turn your mind and imagination over. Excellent disturbing, disgusting visuals, occasional amusing scenes, and convincing use of mechanical sounds to break the silence. Most find films like this senseless, but somehow there’s an allusion to parenthood. After watching, it’s like waking up from a strange nightmare. Eraserhead will surely glued those who wish to experience the bizarre to the fullest to their seats.

Watch Eraserhead here

Eraserhead is David Lynch’s first feature film. It was completed on a mere $20,000 budget, coming from an initial $10,000 grant from the college where he was studying, and loans he collected over the years from friends, when the grant money was over. This is why it took Lynch six years to complete production. It’s the story of a few days in the life of Henry Spencer, a printer on vacation, and his relation with his estranged girlfriend, who leaves him with the mutant monster of a baby she has just given birth to. It’s a post-atomic society, as we see from the atomic mushroom portrait picture, hanging on top of Henry’s bed. Most of the characters aren’t meant to be the representation of people, but rather that of dreams, psychoses, literary topoi, grotesque allegories maybe, but certainly not people. But here and, as the audiences will discover, in his later films, Lynch gives themes and motifs actual roles in his films, personifying certain types or characters, so that they can openly and directly show us the interaction they have with the people in the story. This is why some characters in Eraserhead have names like Beautiful Girl Across The Hall, Lady In The Radiator, and Man In The Planet.

The director defined this debut film as his most spiritual to date and, personally, I do appreciate it from a spiritual point of view; the sense of immanence of which the movie is permeated is a clear sign of the presence of a longing for something higher, an attempt to discover the mechanics behind everything and move in unison with them.
This film is Lynch through and through, as we have come to appreciate him and his visions, but it does have a certain naïveté about it, and the sense of active experimentation is very strong; possibly, because of this, his best film to date.

Lynch’s best indeed! It’s his most distilled film - cutting straight to the heart of his beautiful filmmaking technique. This is not a feel good movie, but the ultimate filmic experience. I never knew a film could make me FEEL so strongly - be it anxiety, or anything else.

It plays out alien and sinister throughout, removed from reality by its odd pacing and social anxieties made manifest. It contains some simply GORGEOUS chiaroscuro hard lighting! I won’t go into what the film means to me, but its certainly spiritual and transcends just “being entertainment”. 10/10.

This film singlehandedly made me a cinephile. After seeing it, I couldn’t and cannot get enough of film - a beautiful medium (or merging of media, another discussion) of expression.

It is all very bleak and though I can appreciate that aspect of the film, the narrative goes to hell in favor of it’s surrealist imagery with a disfigured man acting as the hand of fate landing Henry in a bizarre situation beyond that of conventional impending fatherhood. It was contronting at times and difficult to sit through at first, but once I let myself become absorbed in the absurdity the film became far more interesting to me. If you aren’t a fan of dimly lit black and white psychological horror, this film is perhaps not for you.

My journey into surrealism.

I will always be a fan of horror and gore movies. When DVD first came out in 1999 I indulged myself into all the horror movies I could find. Anything FUCKED up, Faces Of Death, etc. Then someone told me to watch “Eraserhead”

There’s no need to explain this movie. Most people hate it, I am part of the fans who believe it to be a visual artistic surreal nightmare. So if you like watching Black & White nightmares on celluloid buy this DVD!

What’s fuckin awesome about this DVD is that right in the beginning David Lynch asks you to set up the CONTRAST and BRIGHTNESS of your TV set. And PLEASE follow the instructions carefully because the viewing experience is absolutely BEAUTIFUL!

I think the Baby will go down as the most disgusting Baby ever in CINEMA! Show me a crazier baby!! I dare you to show this movie to a pregnant woman! I fuckin DARE YOU!

I watch this movie once a year because it is a masterpiece in my humble opinion, I have seen nothing like it. Nothing can touch it’s originality and SOUND! Like I said movies are a visual medium but the way David Lynch uses SOUND needs to be HEARD! The music, the ambiance….absolutely fuckin horrific and eerie.

I can’t wait for this to come to Blu-Ray so I could see the full detail of the Baby flesh because I’m that CRAZY!

So quit being a fuckin film snob geek and actually give this a try. Chances are you won’t like it, chances are you’ll be fuckin bored by the pacing, but guaranteed you’ll never see another movie like it. And if you don’t like this fuckin movie I recommend you commit suicide and kill yourself so you can go to Heaven because IN HEAVEN EVERYTHING IS FINE!

Now excuse me while I go carve some chickens!

10 out of 10

I must admit I felt a little disappointed after reading 5 star reviews and then watching this movie. To me it lacks the dangerous edge and atmosphere of impending doom that Lynch’s masterpieces have in spades (Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive). I was also extremely put off by the fact that the poor baby suffers interminably, I couldn’t help but feel pity for it and try to help it in some way…Sure there are some unsettling sequences, mainly when Henry goes to see the Lady In the Radiator, but it seems tame in comparison to his later work.

I had to google the question of why this film is considered a masterpiece, because I just don’t get it. I learned a lot from the reviews I found, and I see why the movie is different, if not groundbreaking in some ways. I appreciate the soundscape and the science behind that for instance. BUT, the film is just so repulsive that I cannot give it a nod in any fashion. This is anti-film, proof that for some if you shoot a steaming pile of doo in black and white, they will rave over it. It is deeply disturbing. It is vile, and again, it is repulsive. There is no theme, no message, no point, nothing for the viewer to take away with them, just repulsive imagery to try and forget. I just could not wait for it to end, and I will never watch it again. I add my voice to those who say it is simply weird for weird’s sake. This film is not a masterpiece of any kind. I say that in case you feel the same way, so you won’t feel compelled to say otherwise just because so many other people want to call it that.

I know David Lynch is considered something of a deity among the film community, but this is something I’ve never really understood. I can’t help but believe he is a bit overrated.

It seems that everyone raves about his work, and how it’s unparalleled and whatnot, but frankly it’s not very difficult to maintain such a title when other auteurs know that if they were to create anything even comprable to his work in terms of sheer wierdness it would be dismissed as indecipherable nonsense, which it is (see Eraserhead).

Somehow Lynch has managed to evade such criticism over the years and remains fondly admired by the film community, I am perplexed as to how he does it. He prefers to just be wierd for the sake of being wierd.

His work is so “deeply personal” that it seems to be something only for Lynch himself to enjoy, with no redeeming value for the audience. With the exception of “The Elephant Man” (1980 — his one film which is somehow miraculously devoid of excessive unnecessary wierdness), there’s no formula, meaning, or method to his films. It’s just the stuff one would expect to see at the media and performance art section of the MoMA, not a cinema. Although this doesn’t seem to stop artsy college students and hipsters alike from drooling over him.

In short, if you’re feeling brazen enough to pay a hefty toll on your wallet (Much like I mistakenly did with this $35 beast), and/or enjoy self-induced cerebral hemorrhages/aneurysms from bewildering, muddled, asinine visual content, then give Lynch a try. Eraserhead, Mulholland Dr., his butchered defilement of DUNE, Dumbland, or what have you.

Cheers.

A young David Lynch never divulged details about the making of his films. Lynch has also maintained and fed mysteries about his debut film Eraserhead (1977). David Foster Wallace was talking about David Lynch’s influence during one of his interviews with Charlie Rose and that’s how I learned about this filmmaker. Wallace was talking about Blue Velvet (1986), I thought I should start with David Lynch’s ‘most spiritual’ cinematic work — a horror film, Eraserhead, which Lynch wrote during his first year at a film school.

I saw Eraserhead last week but am still humming ‘In Heaven Everything Is Fine’. Actually, this is the only thing I’d like to recall from the movie. Lynch introduces the ultimate comic relief with this strain but not in less disturbing way. The chipmunk-cheek woman could remind many the women they hate but have been forced to live with no end in sight. If you’re talking about aesthetics, the song is beautiful but how many could possibly find aesthetics beautiful?

Lynch’s alien baby brought chill running down my spine. This whining baby mocks its father Henry while he desperately seeks the seductress across the hall. What follows is sickening distorted human desire that culminates Eraserhead into a cult classic. How can one be so true to his thoughts? But artists do propel minor emotions to an exaggerated proportion: a dining scene where a nervous Henry is sitting next to his girlfriend’s father across the cooked chicken that spurts dark liquid and wiggles ‘obscenely’ on its plate. All this reminds the tension one faces at the house of a girlfriend who has bore a deformed ‘baby’ prematurely.

Eraserhead seems to have multiple climaxes which make it obvious that Lynch was confronted with far too many ideas and faced dilemma to give a conclusive end to his film which took five of his productive years mainly due to inadequate funding. And fund is something every new director lacks! Lynch’s ‘Philadelphia Story’ and the period in-between the making of Eraserhead is more ghastly.

The film lacks coherence and its symbolic ‘spiritualism’ could be out of normal heads unless you’re on drugs. Here, another fictional spiritual classic, Bible, could be of some help. Brave hearts can sit and enjoy the thrill while neurotics might as well relate to Lynch’s ‘beautiful’ depiction of the life spent in seclusion and constant fear. Lynch introduces bizarre ideas in a brilliant fashion that scares less and seduces more. But Eraserhead isn’t a must-watch unless you’re a movie freak and find black and white stock really appealing.

— Oct 16, ’08

lineal y consecuentes los planos, un personaje en el que se centra la historia muy bien “realizado”, construído y sobre todo con características que en los films de la época aún no asomaban, B/N de altísimo contraste, maravilloso, abrumador totalmente encajado con los sórdidos ambientes, el sonido es sin duda uno de los mejores aportes a la atmósfera. De admirar .. que la pelicula no se terminó sino hasta 5 años después y aún así no hay rupturas ni partes fragmentadas, el cabello de Henry aún fué el mismo.

This remarkable debut film from David Lynch was the product of more than five years of shooting and editing is a surrealistic odyssey that came to become one of the most fascinating films to come out of the 1970’s as well as a cult film phenomenon.
David Lynch has described Eraserhead as “a dream of dark and troubling things.” It certainly is that as well as many other things. The film itself lacks a linear storyline and is very hard to follow. Eraserhead is a film up for interpretation, it is a surrealistic dreamscape and questions like “What is this film about?” are irrelevant. Eraserhead is whatever you want it to be. It is arguable however that the film bears somewhat of a storyline which starts with a symbolic scene of the main character Henry being conceived which is followed by the introduction of his pregnant girlfriend. Henry then moves in with his girlfriend after she gives premature birth to something that looks horrifying similar to a cow fetus. The “baby” cries non-stop and then the girlfriend moves away. The rest of the film from this scene loses linear structure and jumps back and forth between dreams and hallucinations that Henry has. This possibly could be symbolizing Henry’s state of mind while dealing with his unexpected “baby.”
Eraserhead is not for everyone. The film goes along at a slow pace and at times is very disturbing. The film is very creepy and unsettling with the black and white photography and forever strange and mysterious noises which surround every scene. The film will not appeal to the squeamish, those with a short attention span, or those who like dialogue in pictures for Eraserhead has few. I would compare the film to such cinema classics as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, Un Chien Andalou as well as the surrealistic classics, Begotten and Tetsuo:The Iron Man. One thing is certain however, and that is that if you see this film then you will never forget it. Eraserhead is one of the most beautiful films ever devised, a masterpiece of mood setting and atmosphere with absolutely beautiful black and white cinematography and lighting which is endlessly challenging and unsettling. This is as close to dream logic as cinema can get, a dream nearly perfectly captured on film.

Nate recommends these films if you enjoyed Eraserhead:

Basically, the ones that I mentioned in my review.

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)

F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922)

Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) (HIGHLY RECOMENDED!)

E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten (1991) (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! If you turn out to be one of the few who actually like Eraserhead, Begotten is a MUST SEE! All of Merhige’s other films suck though.)

Also check out all of David Lynch’s films and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s films for more Eraserhead kind of fun!