10 Horror Movies Nobody Understands

On the face of it, this twisted, damaged drama is a prequel to David Lynch's television masterpiece Twin Peaks, establishing the events that led to poor, doomed Laura Palmer being found dead (wrapped in plastic) at the beginning of that series.

But it's far more than that. Twin Peaks was an uneasy amalgamation of the daytime soap opera and the murder mystery: the show navigated a cliff path in a storm, always in danger of tumbling into the abyss. Fire Walk With Me simply steps off the edge and takes you with it, complicating the original story rather than expanding on it as a traditional prequel would.

You can clearly see the shape of Lynch's later work in Fire Walk With Me's staccato, elliptical storytelling: this is how he made movies from here on in. That chaotic, experimental form winds its way around the film’s structure like the chaotic, supernatural forces that wind themselves around the town of Twin Peaks.

The weirder aspects of the TV show are here upgraded to full-on bugf*ck crazy. The dancing dwarf in the Black Lodge turns out to be Mike's missing arm. Killer BOB's motivation for all the horror it inflicts is to feed on something called garmonbozia (the pain and sorrow in the human soul), visually represented by creamed corn.

However, making sense of the film means forensically analysing material in and around it as much as the film itself. Without that autopsy, Fire Walk With Me confounds as much as it explains.