10 Best Body Horror Movies

Eraserhead is David Lynch’s debut feature film and stars Jack Nance as Henry Spencer and Charlotte Stewart as his girlfriend, Mary X. The film is set in a nightmarish industrial wasteland with most of the inhabitants living in squalid, abandoned looking buildings.

Henry is invited to Mary’s parents for dinner one evening and is accosted by Mary’s mother who tells him he has fathered a child with Mary. However, the baby is a mutated creature not resembling a human child at all, with the exceptions of its cries.

Mary X, suffering from extreme sleep deprivation, swiftly leaves Henry and the baby and returns to her parents. Henry spends much of his time ruminating in the apartment and has a number of increasingly disturbing hallucinations or dreams which eventually lead to a horrifying conclusion to his care of the baby.

There are a number of elements which went on to be common throughout Lynch’s work: the black and white photography is stark and depressive and the sound design is outstanding. The use of diegetic music is particularly good and became a staple of Lynch’s future work.

The legacy of Eraserhead has stretched throughout the genre and developed a huge cult following. Stanley Kubrick famously screened Eraserhead to his cast of The Shining to illustrate the mood he wanted to capture.