10 Creepiest David Lynch Characters

While David Lynch is the master of creating dark, surreal stories, Eraserhead stands out as perhaps the closest he (or anyone else) has come to truly recreating a nightmare on film. The story of one man's fear of fatherhood brought horrifically to life, it sees shy factory worker Henry Spencer given custody of a sickly, deformed baby.

This alien fetus is one of the most disturbing creations in cinematic history. A glistening, misshapen creature that does little but gasp and scream through the night, we're never sure if it's human or not. Its bulbous head pokes out from a cloth wrap that doesn't remotely resemble the shape of a baby's body. Late in the film, it grows sick, and Henry cuts the cloth open to reveal rudimentary organs, as if the cloth were actually the baby's skin. It then begins to spew out thick, white gunk, before its head grows as large as Henry's apartment.

One of the most horrifying things about the baby is that no one involved with the film's production has revealed how the effect was achieved. The way the creature moves feels animatronic, but it looks very life-like for such a low-budget movie. Some have speculated that the baby is actually a rabbit, sheep, or cow fetus made into a puppet. David Lynch will neither confirm or deny this, but once the idea is in your head, it's hard to shake, and the squawling baby only becomes harder to look at.