Quick recap: Poor Henry can’t catch a break on vacation- his girlfriend leaves him to care for their new mutant baby and he has a terrible time of it. Luckily, he has his weird neighbor to keep him company as well as a girl in the radiator.
Mondays, am I right??
Fun (?) fact: Director David Lynch has been cryptic about the origin of the mutant baby- everything from it being a calf fetus to something having been born nearby.
My thoughts: Here’s a fun tip for all you cinephiles out there- do NOT watch anything of David Lynch’s body of work when you are alone in a hotel room. Trust me on this. What makes it worse is that I know what a Lynch film is capable of doing to me and I STILL went through with it. This is why I can’t have nice things.
No, I have no clue what this movie is about or what the symbolism means. David Lynch has said that it is a very personal film for him and if so, I’m really worried. It’s hard to pick the most wtf moment- when the mutant baby got sick, the whole chicken carving scene, when Henry’s girlfriend kept birthing (?) little alien worms which he then proceeded to throw against the wall? All of them traumatized me in their own special way. At the same time, I couldn’t look away. There were times I had to remind myself to blink because no matter what, I had to see what horrible thing would pop up next. It’s rubbernecking in the most extreme sense.
There is a part of me that thinks even David Lynch doesn’t know why he did what he did. At times, it just seems like he cobbled together all of the weird dreams he probably has and put them on film so we could suffer too. Maybe he is hoping someone, somewhere, can find meaning and interpret what is a very active subconscious. That person isn’t me, though. After the movie ended, I could clearly hear girls in the next room laughing just like the mutant baby at the end of the film. I jumped out of bed, threw on clothes, ran downstairs and sat in the sunlight for a few minutes, thankful that here, David Lynch’s imagination can’t hurt me.
dude has a thing for checkered floors. Someone should explore that.
Final review: I feel like I should give this a made up number like eleventeen but in the end, I’ll stick with 4/5
Up next: HORRORFEST is sadly drawing to a close
1001 Movie Nights 
It’s been established that this film at least partially has to do with Lynch’s experience as a single father, raising his infant daughter. How would you like to be the kid who inspired Eraserhead?
Instead of trying to make sense of his experience, and come to terms with it through his art, so that we all might find some measure of enlightenment too, he decided to give us intermittent horrible nightmares for the rest of our lives.
Thanks, David!