10 Best Movies Named After Popular Songs

David Lynch is not a filmmaker with a conventional attitude to developing movie concepts and his 1986 surrealist nightmare neo-noir cult classic is no exception. All that Lynch had in mind initially was the image of a severed ear in a field and the words "blue velvet". At that point he wasn't even really thinking of the crooner standard of the same name, first recorded by Tony Bennett in 1951.

It was only after the difficulties of making his version of Dune, and a desire to make a more personal project to follow it up, that Lynch returned to the idea and latched onto the 1963 recording of the song by teen idol lounge singer Bobby Vinton, developing the whole deranged trip of a movie from there.

The song, a nostalgic memento of past love, isn't the most obvious fit for a movie about drug dealing and sado-masochistic sex slavery behind the white picket fences of Reaganite suburbia. Isabella Rossellini's Dorothy does sing it, though, (and wear the titular fabric) as part of her nightclub act.

In fact, the movie as a whole relies on a soundtrack with one foot in vintage (Roy Orbison's In Dreams also features prominently), which is successfully reminiscent of the age of classic noir, whilst also dissonant with the film's more explicitly horrific elements.