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Isaac Huckaby

Dr. Mallory-Kani/Prof. Richardson

Critical Writing

18 April 2017

Eraserhead and the Terror of the Familiar

Of all of David Lynch’s films, Eraserhead is the hardest to categorically place into a

genre. Though all his films are distinctly “Lynch,” he usually interprets an established genre or

style in his own, unique way. Blue Velvet, for example, is mostly a neo-noir crime film, while

The Elephant Man and The Straight Story are both semi-biographical dramas created with

Lynch’s signature oddities, featuring quirky characters, unusual plot structure, and somewhat

abstract ideas. Eraserhead, his first feature film, still stands as a bit of an anomaly even in the

inherent weirdness of his oeuvre. His first film, though arthouse through and through, has many

of the trappings of a classic horror film. The film is shot in black-and-white, invoking the classic

Universal horror films such as Dracula and Frankenstein. Also like these films, Eraserhead

features a minimal soundtrack (though ambient, industrial noises fill up the silence in nearly the

entirety of the film). However, unlike most of these classic horror films, and even most of the

horror films released around the time of Eraserhead’s production over a five year period in the

70s, Eraserhead is abstract, opting for a more interpretive narrative structure rather than a

straightforward story, and relies heavily on unsettling imagery, tonal cues, and disorienting

sound design. The story the film tells is deceptively simple; after a man’s girlfriend reveals she is

pregnant at an awkward family dinner, she gives birth to a strange-looking child, and leaves her

boyfriend, Henry Spencer, and the child. Spencer then attempts to raise the bizarre child himself.

This plot seems more like something from a family drama than an arthouse film, but it is Lynch’s

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vision and direction that change the events of the film into something more unsettling. Lynch

makes use of the idea of the “uncanny,” something Freud described as “that class of the

terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar,” (1), in his

eponymous essay. Through his use of the uncanny, this slight twisting of reality, Lynch reveals

the most mundane fears people can have (the fear of having a child, the fear of broken or failed

relationships, etc.), and shows the truly horrific nature of “everyday life.” This is in line with

James Joyce’s musing, recounted by Paul Wells in his book The Horror Genre, that “Terror is

the feeling which arrests the mind, in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human

sufferings and unites it with the cause.” (Wells 1). Both Joyce and Lynch understand that true

horror comes from experiences that all humans share. As a result, I contend that not only is

Eraserhead a horror film, but that it is a horror film in the purest sense. While Wells states that,

“the horror genre is predominantly concerned with the fear of death,” (10), Lynch’s film

concerns itself with the fear of life. Lynch’s film captures universal fears that people harbor

during their lives, and presents them in such a way as to reveal their truly terrifying nature.

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Eraserhead is heavily influenced by the early “talkie” films of the 1930s, particularly the

films of Tod Browning and James Whale. According to The Monster Show, David J. Skal’s

history of the horror genre, “Tod Browning himself had been directly influenced by [Freud’s]

‘The Uncanny’” (Skal 76). This Freudian influence is most clearly seen in Browning’s film

Freaks, which details a group of circus “sideshow freaks” that includes a former trapeze artist

disfigured to a horrific state by other disfigured “freaks.” Freaks uses a sense of the uncanny to

create an uncomfortable atmosphere and presentation by showing the former beauty of

Cleopatra, the trapeze artist, and contrasting it to her disturbing, disfigured state, which is just

“Cleopatra” or human enough to be unsettling. This sort of “off” humanity is also apparent in

James Whale’s Frankenstein, in which Boris Karloff’s monster makeup “emerge[s] as a subtle

exaggeration of...Karloff’s natural features” (Skal 134). In this same vein, Lynch makes use of

the uncanny, unsettling characters to create a sense of terror in his film. Among the more obvious

of these slight corruptions of familiar, everyday people and objects include the Lady in the

Radiator, who appears to be something of a “circus freak” herself, sporting a disturbing, swollen

face and singing “In heaven, everything is fine.” More importantly, Spencer’s freakish baby

(Figure 1) is portrayed as something strangely inhuman.

Figure 1: Spencer's unearthly child

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The baby has a long, animalistic face and a long neck, but is completely hairless, giving it the

appearance of a fetal lamb or goat. The baby’s incessant crying adds to this unsettling

characterization, emitting a noise less like the cry of a human infant and more like that of a dying

animal. However, the baby is still just human enough to ignite a sense of familiarity, being

wrapped in swaddling cloth as any human infant would. In presenting Spencer’s child in this

grotesque yet familiar manner, Lynch conveys the idea of raising a child as something that is

truly terrifying, but also something that humanity, in all its various cultures and creeds, deals

with on an everyday basis. While Browning’s and Whale’s films drew on the fear of monsters

and “freaks,” more tangible and apparent threats, Lynch is drawing attention to the inherent fears

of childrearing, a more deeply buried but universal fear, and expands upon Browning’s and

Whale’s use of the uncanny.

The use and acceptability of violent imagery effects the methods horror films use to

create dread, and Eraserhead uses these kinds of images to add to add another layer to its sense

of the uncanny. Barbara Creed, in her essay “Freud’s Worst Nightmare,” comments upon early

horror films’ ability to portray violent and disturbing imagery, stating, “A horror film can present

a relatively disturbing image (truly horrific abject images are withheld) that has the power to

activate the viewer’s worst fears, and then can screen or protect the viewer from that fear by

offering a more palatable one in its place.” (195-6). As horror evolved and moral norms changed,

films were able to show more gore and violence, but the earliest horror films could not rely on

such disturbing images. Creed’s observation is seen in early horror films such as Whale’s

Frankenstein. Most of the direct violence in this film occurs offscreen, and the terror of this

violence is felt through the characters’ acknowledgement that something is “off.” The first true

instance of violence in the film is when Frankenstein’s creature murders his creator’s lab

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assistant, Fritz, who is seen previously pestering and antagonizing the creature. The death occurs

off-screen, and Whale presents only Frankenstein’s and his mentor’s reaction to Fritz’s dying

screams, interrupting a conversation the two were having. This is Whale once again playing to

the uncanny. Frankenstein and his mentor, Dr. Waldman, are shown having an intense, but

perfectly realistic, conversation, when Fritz’s screams pierce the scene. Whale breaks the

monotony of the two men’s conversation, creating an unsettling event from an ordinary one, all

without using images of Fritz’s death or other violent images. Even in Psycho, released in 1960,

twenty-nine years after Whale’s film, terror is produced from the distortion of reality rather than

blatantly violent or overtly-disturbing images. The famous shower scene, for instance, shows

very little of Marion Crane’s wounds, with director Alfred Hitchcock opting instead to focus on

Norman Bates’s erratic stabbing and the blood draining into the shower. Hitchcock works within

the moral constraints of his time and creates a terrifying scene by taking an ordinary, everyday

task, a shower, and distorting it with Norman Bates’s erratic stabbing (made even more twisted

by his belief that he is his mother, donning her clothes and personality) and bloody, but

restrained, imagery. Later horror films, however, are less restrained in the amount of gore and

violence they can convey, allowing for Creed’s “truly horrific abject images.” John Carpenter’s

Halloween, released just a year after Lynch’s film in 1978 and heavily inspired by Hitchcock’s

Psycho, features a scene where the film’s villain, Michael Myers, stabs a teenager into a wall,

pinning him there. (Figure 2).

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Figure 2: Michael Myers looking at his pinned victim

Yet Carpenter understands that the terror is not in the image of the impaled teenager itself, it is in

the suspense leading up to that violent image. As Hitchcock himself stated, “There is no terror in

the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” Carpenter builds up the tension leading to this scene

through carefully directing Michael’s victim’s movements throughout the house and allowing the

slow-burning suspense to amount. Though Lynch’s film can (and does) show imagery just as

violent as Carpenter’s, Lynch opts to use the images to build terror in an uncanny manner that is

both similar to and builds upon that used by the horror films of the golden age. Lynch’s use of

violent, grotesque, or otherwise disturbing imagery is part of his portrayal of the horrific nature

of everyday life. Henry Spencer’s baby, again, is involved in one of these blatantly gory images.

Spencer, grown tired of the child’s incessant screaming, investigates the child’s swaddling cloth.

Unwrapping the cloth, he finds that the child’s insides are exposed (Figure 3), Spencer putting

the child out of its misery by stabbing it.

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Figure 3: The baby, insides violently and grotesquely exposed.

The violent image of the child’s exposed organs and Spencer stabbing it take an already distorted

image of a human child and distorts it once again, creating an image that is grotesque and

horrifying, but still retains its uncomfortable element of familiarity. The image again draws

attention to the fear of childrearing, but presents a scenario in which the fear is fully realized.

The fear of failing as a parent is truly universal and ordinary, and this violent scene highlights it

by portraying a tangible example of the fear. Lynch can use the more lenient moral norms of his

time to portray the same level of violence and gore (if not more) as contemporaries such as

Carpenter, but endues it with the uncanny spirit of golden age horror’s scares rather than relying

on mounting tension or suspense to build up the horrific images. However, Lynch does not stop

at merely replicating the distortion of reality used in early horror films; he expounds upon it by

using it to draw attention to nearly universal and perfectly usual fears, rather than supernatural or

unusual threats.

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Lynch’s use of sound design to create an eerie atmosphere harkens to golden age horror,

with a very notable example being Tod Browning’s Dracula. Dracula is an incredibly quiet film,

with very little in the way of a score (until Philip Glass recorded a new score for the film in the

late 90s). Instead of relying on musical cues to create a sense of foreboding, Browning’s film

takes the opposite approach. In many shots of the film, Browning allows the action of the film to

play out quietly. The intensity of the direction emphasizes the intentional silence. For instance,

when attention is drawn to Dracula’s eyes (Figure 2), the lighting slowly moves towards the

count’s eyes, while everything remains silent.

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Figure 4: Dracula's intense, silent gaze

This silence allows the unsettling image of Dracula’s intense gaze to pierce the viewer, and, like

with Browning’s previously mentioned film Freaks, creates a sense of uncanny by emphasizing

the familiarity of both the silence and the visual of an intense glare, but also emphasizes the “off”

quality these elements present when put together. Like Dracula, Lynch’s film utilizes almost no

music, save for a few songs which are used intentionally and sparingly. Unlike Browning’s

vampire film, however, Lynch opts to fill the background with ambient noises and a sort of

“industrial drone.” This droning sound is implied to be coming from the industrial areas that

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surround Spencer’s home, which are urban and familiar sounds heard in any major, Western city.

The noises are, as Freud would describe, “ Friendly, intimate, [and] homelike” (3). The

persistence and presentation of this noise makes it become part of the film’s unsettling

atmosphere. According to James Wierzbicki in Music, Sound, and Filmmakers: Sonic Style in

Cinema, Eraserhead’s soundtrack is “ruthlessly negligent of the difference between dream and

reality.” (182). In other words, Eraserhead’s droning, ambient background noise adds to the odd,

unsettling world the film creates that is so very familiar but so very unsettling. Lynch’s use of

sound is a technique that was used even in the earliest horror films capable of full sound, but

Lynch’s application is wholly unique, and builds upon the ground set by Browning and others.

Whereas Dracula simply juxtaposed intense imagery with silence, Eraserhead applies the use of

sound to convey the horrors of normality. The use of sound allows Lynch to draw attention to a

very common fear of getting stuck in a routine. The constant droning accents the daily activities

Spencer is seen engaging in early in the film. Even with Eraserhead’s sometimes gory,

unsettling imagery, the droning, industrial sound that fills almost the entirety of the film is most

unsettling when juxtaposed with the most “ordinary” events seen in the film, such as Spencer

dining with his girlfriend’s parents, or even just walking into his apartment from the hallway.

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Moments of levity or comedic relief often pervade golden age horror films, and Lynch’s

film is aware of this in multiple ways. James Whale is a master of inserting comedy into the most

conceptually terrifying films. Whale’s Frankenstein sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, adapts a

scene from Shelley’s original novel (the monster encountering an elderly, blind man and

attempting a friendship), but gives it a strange, comedic edge. In the film, Frankenstein’s oafish

creation (again played with an astounding amount of uncanny humanity by the incomparable

Boris Karloff), stumbles into the home of a lonesome, blind priest. There, the priest introduces

the humongous creature to many ordinary things, such as cigars and soup, while dining with him,

and the monster’s curious reactions to these ordinary objects create a sense of comedy only

Whale is capable of conveying. The creature humorously puffs on a cigar and furiously shovels

soup into his mouth. Meanwhile, the priest attempts to form a friendship with Frankenstein’s

unfortunate creation. While the comedy in this scene stems from the creature’s curiosity and

enthusiasm towards the ordinary stimulus provided by the priest, the film doesn’t lose its sense

of terror, as it is apparent that the creature could snap and attack his unwitting host at any

moment. In Eraserhead, there is a similar “dinner” scene that is ripe with comedic levity, but

Lynch’s approach makes the humor itself an unsettling aspect of the situation by again playing

into the atmosphere of uncanny realism. Spencer dines with his girlfriend’s family while her

talkative father attempts to make conversation with the clearly uncomfortable Spencer. He tells

Spencer a story about losing the use of his arm, and eventually regaining the use of it but not

being able to “feel a damn thing in it.” The meal in question served is oddly small whole

chickens, possibly Cornish hens. The old man asks Spencer to cut the chickens due to the lack of

feeling in his arm, to which Spencer humorously replies, “I just cut them like regular chickens?”

(Figure 5).

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Figure 5: Spencer asks the old man the proper way to cut the strange chicken

As the old man continues to ramble, the chickens move and ooze a thick liquid, with Spencer

looking on, uncomfortable but silent. The scene, while invoking a more humorous tone with the

rambling old man and the unusually small, grotesque chicken, still retains the darkness of the rest

of the film, and even uses its comical nature to accent that dark sense of the uncanny that

pervades the film and designates it as horror. The humor involves a seemingly everyday

occurrence, a chicken dinner, but manages to twist it just enough to give it an uncomfortable,

disconcerting edge. This, in effect, plays up a fear that Lynch is drawing attention to, the fear of

meeting and interacting with a significant other’s family. The discomfort and fear of meeting a

romantic partner’s family is one that most people in a modern, Western cultural framework will

experience at some point in their life, and by carefully (and somewhat humorously) distorting a

single element of this common event, in this case the dinner itself, Lynch reveals the fear in a

direct and visible way. Lynch’s use of the humorous in creating his uncanny world carries on a

tradition set forth by James Whale in the earliest years of golden-age horror, and expands upon it

by collapsing the horrific and the comedic to create something that is unique to the film.

I argue that Eraserhead’s status as a definitive entry into the horror genre becomes

indisputable when applying its aesthetic and thematic elements to the concept of the uncanny,

and even with the genre’s evolving tropes and motifs, this contention still stands. Lynch’s film is

a look at the terrors of everyday life, and by merely twisting or exaggerating elements of these

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ordinary fears, Lynch makes them truly, tangibly horrific. Whereas the golden-age films of

Browning and Whale play on fears of circus freaks and undead monsters, and Lynch’s

contemporaries such as Carpenter convey tangible fears and human monsters, Eraserhead shines

a light on fears that are universal across humanity. These fears, such as child-rearing, social

interaction, and the general, unending routine of human life, are fears that any individual can

harbor, and Lynch’s film brings these fears to a state that can be felt in all the senses, allowing

for a more thorough (and terrifying) understanding of the hidden fears that inhabit humanity.

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Works Cited

Browning, Tod, dir. Dracula. Universal Pictures, 1931. Film

Browning, Tod, dir. Freaks. Metro Goldwyn Mayer, 1932. Film.

Carpenter, John, dir. Halloween. Compass International, 1978. Film

Creed, Barbara. "Freud's Worst Nightmare: Dining with Dr. Lecter." Horror Film and

Psychoanalysis, Steven J. Schneider, Cambridge University Press, 188-202.

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Penguin Books, 2003.

Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. Psycho. Paramount Pictures, 1960. Film.

Joseph, Rachel Verfasser (Author). “Eat My Fear”: Corpse and Text in the Films and Art of

David Lynch. 2015.

Keisner, Jody. “Do You Want to Watch? A Study of the Visual Rhetoric of the Postmodern

Horror Film.” Women’s Studies, vol. 37, no. 4, June 2008, pp. 411–427.

Lynch, David, dir. Blue Velvet. De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 1986. Film.

Lynch, David, dir. Eraserhead. Libra Films International, 1977. Film.

Lynch, David, dir. The Elephant Man. Paramount Pictures, 1980. Film.

Lynch, David, dir. The Straight Story. Buena Vista, 1999. Film.

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Prawer, S. S.1925-2012 (Siegbert Salomon), and Rouben Mamoulian Collection (Library of

Congress). Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror. Oxford University Press,

1980.

Prince, Stephen. The Horror Film. Rutgers University Press, 2004.

Skal, David J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. Norton, 1993.

Spadoni, Robert. Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror

Genre. University of California Press, 2007.

Wells, Paul. The Horror Genre from Beelzebub to Blair Witch. Wallflower, 2000.

Whale, James, dir. Bride of Frankenstein. Universal Pictures, 1935. Film.

Whale, James, dir. Frankenstein. Universal Pictures, 1931. Film.

Wierzbicki, James Eugene, and editor. Music, Sound and Filmmakers: Sonic Style in Cinema.

Routledge, 2012.