10 Great Horror Movies Made In Really Weird Ways

The average horror film is shot in just a few weeks, but for his masterful feature debut Eraserhead, David Lynch spend a period of five years shooting and completing it.

The primary reason was budgetary, that Lynch could only shoot when he had available funds, as well as his own deliberate, painstaking approach to filming said scenes.

Because the shoot lasted so long, sets had been torn down and had to be recreated, lead actor Jack Nance needed to retain his iconic frizzy hair for literally years, and the film's original cinematographer, Herbert Cardwell, even died mid-production.

Hell, fragments of some scenes were shot years apart - most famously, a shot of Nance's protagonist Henry opening a door was filmed an entire year before the subsequent shot of him entering the room.

Even once principal photography was completed, however, Lynch spent a year working on the sound before the picture was finished.

And yet, as surreal and bizarre as Eraserhead might be, there's an internal cohesiveness to it which belies just how long its journey to the screen was.