10 Most Horrifying Urban Nightmare Movies

After his 1984 flop Dune, Lynch decided to use his new found fame to create a film more akin to his first film Eraserhead. The result was the 1986 psychological horror neo-noir movie Blue Velvet, a film that helped revitalize the career of Isabella Rosselini and Dennis Hopper.

Blue Velvet tells the story of Jeffrey Beaumont, a young man who returns home to the idyllic suburbs of Lumberton to look after his paralyzed father. After a chance encounter with a severed ear, his curiosity plunges him into the seedy underbelly of this happy suburb. Blue Velvet is primarily a film about the realistic dark side of suburbia, where picket fences disguise perverted horror.

This nightmare of a movie is very hard to describe because watching it is an experience unlike any other. Lynch’s particular style oozes from frame to frame in a weird, wonderfully surreal way that exaggerates everything on screen, and Hopper’s portrayal of the symbolically named Frank Booth is nothing less than terrifying to witness. The contrast between Beaumont’s idyllic life and Booth’s depraved existence is a jarring spectacle that reflects many real-life news stories of shocking crime in suburban areas.

The result is an uncomfortable experience that was so shocking at the time critics lampooned the movie with negative reviews. Nowadays, Blue Velvet is fondly remembered as one of Lynch’s greatest movies, and it marked his career from then on as the king of realistically surreal cinema.