Eraserhead

Tonight's horror flick was David Lynch's first film, Eraserhead. Really, this review could be said in three words:

Weird. 

As.
Hell.

But of course, I'm pretentious and wordy, so i won't leave it at three words like I probably should. Eraserhead is a horror classic that somehow has eluded me, I can now proudly(?) say I've seen it. For a movie with very little dialogue, there is a whole hell of a lot going on: a society industrialized to the brink, a man with both hair and a quizzical look I'd kill for, little chickens that ooze blood, terrible monster mothers, hot (but creepy) next door neighbors, mutant be-jowelled dancing women that live in a radiator, dead tree/pile of dirt bedside lamps (seriously, what was with that?), and, the pièce de résistance, mutant dinosaur lizard babies.

Yeah, pretty much this but creepier. 

All this while having underpinnings of fear around parenthood, sexual hangups and discovery, and the trappings of industrial society. Like I said: a lot going on in this here film.

Eraserhead, in case it's not already readily apparent, is not a "normal" horror film. I kept thinking of the surrealist film collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Un Chien Andalou, throughout the entire film. Both find horror in image, not on story, and achieve a surrealist, nonlinear narrative through these images (if you haven't seen Un Chien Andalou go check it out, if for no other reason the eye scene. For a guy with hangups on eyes...shudders). However, Eraserhead goes one step further and completes the horrifying assault on the senses: sound. The sound grates, wears, screeches, digs, pierces and acts as an element of the horror all it's own. Actually, no matter how creepy or gross the visuals get, the sound always seems to be the most horrifying which is quite an achievement. 

Eraserhead isn't about plot but rather about assaulting your senses and horrifying that way. Is there plot here? Sure, but it definitely takes second fiddle. There's deeper meaning behind all the images too, but, honestly, I enjoyed just giving myself over to the movie as simply an assault on the senses. When I quit trying to make sense (see what I did there?) of it all I found myself surprisingly enjoying it. Well, enjoying it is probably the wrong word. I was... surrealized by it. Yeah, that's not better.

9/10