What 1977 David Lynch film is a surreal horror about a man with a mutant baby? The answer is Eraserhead. David Lynch's feature-length debut stars Jack Nance as Henry Spencer, a nervous man living in a bleak industrial landscape who is left to care for a grotesquely deformed infant after his partner leaves.
Shot in stark black and white, the film turns domestic anxiety, sexuality and parenthood into a nightmarish vision. Henry encounters bizarre images including a woman living inside his radiator, a man operating levers inside a planet and a mysterious creature whose appearance has never been explained by Lynch in a conventional way.
Eraserhead was made with assistance from the American Film Institute while Lynch studied there. Funding problems stretched production over several years, and Lynch even lived in disused stables that he converted into sets. He and sound designer Alan Splet then spent about a year developing the film's unsettling audio.
The movie initially reached small audiences but became a celebrated midnight movie and cult film through repeated late-night screenings. It is sometimes confused with Lynch's later works such as Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks, but Eraserhead is his 1977 debut. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2004.