Eraserhead poster & wallpaper

Allen Joseph, Charlotte Stewart, Jack Nance

This surreal nightmare examines male paranoia. Our hero and title character, Henry, faces a number of horrifying obstacles in meeting someone of the opposite sex, meeting her parents, and procreating....( read more  read more... ) Produced during a one-and-a-half-year period while director David Lynch was a student at the American Film Institute, the film launched him as a major new talent admired by cinephiles and filmmakers all over the world. It stands today as a milestone in personal, independent filmmaking.

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40 critics

Unrated, 1 hr. 29 min.

Directed by: David Lynch

Release Date: January 1, 1977

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DVD Release Date: June 7, 2005

Stats: 4,216 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (4,216)

  • creepfreak
    November 7, 2009
    creepfreak
    DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE, unless you're a BIG David Lynch fan. For those who remember your dreams this movie will be a frightening experience of the most potent psychedelic features in the darkest corners of your mind. For those with no recollection of your dreams this movie is a ...( read more)short reminder of what causes the cold sweats, setting your mind into a state of depressive consciousness. For those looking for answers, or reasoning behind your dreams, than the answer may lie here. Eraserhead is an emotionally frightening nightmare to say the least. It's a dream simply recorded on film, just as bleak and cold as any nightmare you may really have. It's a shattering, lonely, and sometimes repulsive exercise for our subconscious thinking. Before the creation of Eraserhead, David Lynch had a dream. This is what his dream was.

    I guess it's safe to say we all share at least one thing in common. If not for our personality, religion, or upbringing...than what about our dreams?

    Any interpretation of this film is correct. It relies on our own personal perceivability. What do our inner demons tell us? Is there life in fantasy, and does it really matter? Are there living, breating people, with a pulse and a heartbeat in our dream state? And when we wake up does someone, like our character Eraserhead, impatiently wait for us to return?

    This movie is weird, yes. But what dreams aren't? Believe what you will, and make sense of what you want. Eraserhead is a movie in a cold, and scary world. A dimension of improbable madness. A parallel universe of distortion and paranoia...but it's a world we might all share.

    It's a morbid, strangely beautiful, landscape of horror. It has the texture of death itself, but yet it's still very much alive. It's a work of pure genius.

    Dream while awake. Watch Eraserhead!

  • SirPant
    September 30, 2009
    SirPant
    Male paranoia can be a bit of a nightmare at times. Lynch's visual realisation of his own version of male paranoia through this surreal journey is cinema at its best. Only Lynch could make such a colourful film as this in black and white!
  • 366weirdmovies
    May 30, 2009
    366weirdmovies
    Bizarrely coiffed Henry takes responsibility for raising his mutant baby in an urban wasteland, all the while gazing into his radiator at an oatmeal-cheeked woman who sings about the delights of heaven. A measured pace which forces the viewer to notice disquieting, surreal detai...( read more)ls, remarkable black and white cinematography, and a frightening industrial soundscape add up to this David Lynch's best work and the most effective evocation of a nightmare ever put on film.
  • FangsFirst
    April 8, 2009
    FangsFirst
    Let's get the obvious out of the way for people who've read many of my reviews of any kind of surrealist film: generally speaking, I hate David Lynch films.

    Blue Velvet put me to sleep out of sheer boredom. Mulholland Drive put me to sleep, but I woke up and watche...( read more)d it from the beginning and it was boring and dissatisfying. Lost Highway had difficulty holding my interest and just generally seemed totally unnecessarily obscure and uninteresting. His self-described fans make me hate him even more, much the way Quentin Tarantino's fans do. I've actually liked some of each of their work (I did like The Elephant Man and Dune quite a bit, and the great majority of Tarantino's work). I do separate myself from that when I sit down to watch either of their films, but they often suffer under their own weight.

    That said, I always kept an open mind to Lynch's work. I tried Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me a few years back, and it, too, bored me to tears. But I always had an eye open for Eraserhead, which I consistently felt was going to be darker in a grittier way, and, if more obscure, then more obscure in a more fantastic and disturbing sort of fashion. I thought its age, certainly, would help things, as my major complaint with the most recent of Lynch's work was the slickness of it, the bombastic images that seemed to carry no meaning--I think the blue-haired woman saying "Silencio!" with such unnecessary gravitas is what completely broke me and perfectly carries across the reason I do not normally like Lynch originals. It reminds me of the parodies of foreign movies floating through sketch comedy and the like--characters saying completely nonsensical lines as if they are the most meaningful thing in the world, seemingly intended to mean something grand but coming off as pretentious, nonsensical, illogical and self-important. I don't like that kind of "mindfuck" movie (as Lynch's are called), especially when they tend to completely lack characters or emotion. By characters, I mean of course people, rather than walking beings who bear the physical characteristics of humans but function primarily as symbols, concepts or images.

    Strangely, or perhaps not, I found Eraserhead not to be what I expected. I considered a review with a fun bit like, "This film is about Henry Spencer (John Nance) who lives a simple life, but when invited to his ex-girlfriend's house, he discovers that he is a father, leaving him now to--oh forget it, the story doesn't even matter." Truth is, I don't think the story does matter--at least, not in a way that means I should explain it to you before viewing. It isn't relevant to anything except the overall experience, meaning and message. It is inseparable from those things--at least with the intention of retaining meaning, and an element or three is not clear in its meaning in terms of events.

    It's clear--I feel--that part of what is undeniably expressed here is a distaste for sex, coupled with an understanding of its necessity, at least in terms of drive. We see Harry is definitely interested in it, but we also see that the eventual results are not a happy or pleasant thing to him. His world IS a simple one; he wanders around a very empty world into a very empty apartment, shuffling change in a drawer, checking the mail and often staring at his radiator and dreaming. He imagines a woman there, who sings a rather nice song that goes, "In heaven, everything is fine..." implying that this imagined radiator life is the reality Henry would prefer to occupy. He's horribly uncomfortable in the real and empty world; he is constantly surrounded by droning noises of the radiator, elevators, buzzing, humming, clunking, trains and other industrial towns. Never overbearing or rhythmic, but consistent and intrusive all the same. The only other family is the "X" family--his girlfriend of sorts Mary (Charlotte Stewart), and her parents, Mrs. (Jeanne Bates) and Mr. (Allen Joseph) X. Mary is overly emotional and responsive, her mother is overly protective and her father is egocentric and falsely amicable. Not passive aggressive or secretly hostile, but just overly artificial, smiling broadly and shaking hands and speaking of his life and career without regard for the interest of others. Hardly a wonder, then, that another world is heaven. This world, too, is polluted in Henry's dreams, though, when Mary begins to take a larger place in his life and his child appears.

    The star is not Nance (though he has a wonderfully and appropriately expressive face, as well as a perfect demeanor of extended neck but pulled-in head, shoulders and arms hunched in, not in bad posture but in a sign of introversion, and an awkward walk that includes high-raised knees similar to the Tramp's walk, but less exaggerated) but the cinematography by Herbert Cardwell and Frederick Elmes. I've had it said and suggested to me that Lynch is an "artist" and not a "film-maker," unless one thinks of "film" as another medium for "art," rather than as a vehicle for story-telling. I'm inclined to agree. Between said cinematography, which reminds me of silent films, especially of the expressionist variety, and the sound design and "score," centered around the aforementioned oppressive machine sounds and what sounds like someone drawing a neverending bow across a cello string and someone else who has fallen asleep on a piano or synthesizer keyboard, we end up with imagery married to sound. Dialogue is used simply because there is motion in film; as if the story and this dialogue are necessary to the artistic medium and film, but should not be something you can separate from the whole product--which, as I've said, is true here.

    What probably IS strange to people who know me--or possibly anyone who read the opening paragraphs above and knows those films--is that I did like it. I will say a few things now about what I did think of meaning, concepts and some actions. I think, as per usual for me, I have taken an atypical approach to things and see something more positive than most in a character. When Henry is finally home with the child he gave Mary, she screams at him as he tries to sleep thanks to the constant crying of the rather mutated near-foetal child. Henry's response is to tell her perhaps that when she leaves to go home she should stay there. He then places a thermometer in the child's mouth, and when he removes it finding nothing wrong, it suddenly turns clearly ill (one of only two images in the film I really felt my heart skip a beat for, thanks, in part to a jarring chord-thing--I don't think it's an actual chord, again, it's like someone was sitting next to a piano and put an elbow out to lean on it and stayed there--that strikes as the image of this child-thing turning so violently ill appears) he says "You really WERE sick," with a note, I feel, of concern. We soon see he has dropped a vaporator (I believe they're called) next to the child and sits next to it, calmly and without any air of irritation. He thinks of the item he received in the mail and wishes to check for more mail, but when the child cries every time he tries to leave the room, he stops and sits back down, again seeming relaxed and calm, as if he knows this is where he should be and he's comfortable with it.

    He does then attempt to hide it from the woman across the hall who seduces him when he takes her to bed, but not in a way that gave me the impression he didn't care, but simply wanted to satisy his own urge and desire at the moment. His final action with relation to the child I have seen described as vengeful, but I myself didn't see it that way. It looked like a motion of curiosity though I was filled with a sick sense of dread until the ramifications made themselves clear. At that point the movie was nearly ruined I was so repulsed; but Henry has one final response, not one of anger, I think, but of confused and horrified mercy. From there I felt that the movie had found itself again; I had grown to like Henry and was not pleased with what he had done prior, and felt a bit betrayed that the one character I was drawn to was now so utterly reprehensible. But, he redeemed himself in my interpretation, and perhaps even then refined something, the final images seeming to suggest that perhaps the child was in fact himself, or enough of a part of himself--hinted at in dreams anyway--that he had done these things to himself.

    What the hell was the bowl of water? What was the dream that gave the movie its title about? Honestly, I have no idea. I feel the dream was to suggest Henry's own feelings of inadequacy, uselessness and misinterpretation by the world, and the bowl was simply a visual quirk related to Henry's approach to things. It felt like a well-produced and proficient student film, essentially, a feel I think I've established as pleasing. The design overall, including Lynch's own production design, was beautiful (as I've repeatedly mentioned of the excellent cinematography and sound) and Nance was proficient as what I think was a representation of Lynch himself (though, as I sort of roundabout implied through my distaste for styles coupled with my appreciation here, he felt like a representation of an actual person instead of something else), but it had the awkward, lively, slightly clumsy but earnest intensity of a student behind it, just an extremely talented one.

    I'm still annoyed at people referring to Lynch as "genius," because I think he's hit-or-miss and often at his best in "normal" movies, especially adaptations, or at the folk who like to tell those who don't like the films I don't like that they didn't "get" them, as if all that matters is getting them, not whether any reaction or emotion can be gained from them. The overly immature Roger Ebert criticized Clive Barker for saying that art inspires something, even if that something is a bowel movement. I think Clive was right (this is not a great surprise to many, I'm sure, my love of the man is well-documented) and that is absolutely true. Eraserhead made me react. I had a feeling of tension at the two moments noted, and otherwise was in line in some ways with Henry's own feelings, and felt some empathy with his concepts and worldview. I think inspiring sleep is not one of the things Barker meant, however, and so regardless of meaning, I think those films I mentioned fail. While they don't have to be "entertaining," per se, I think they at least need to be engaging, which this film was. Perhaps the running time helped when this approach is used, but that's not exactly relevant either--it does what it needs to do with all necessary steps.
  • ohagankieran
    March 4, 2009
    ohagankieran
    David Lynch has refused to give us his interpretation of this film which has left people speculating its meaning for years and years. It is a completely surreal experience that will have you pulling confused and shocked faces throughout! Shot in black and white, it follows the li...( read more)fe of Henry Spencer who is facing fatherhood in a decaying urban hell. Along with that, he struggles to fight his obsessions with 'the beautiful lady across the hall' and the 'lady in the radiator' amongst other things. I think it is a very symbollic film and most of what you see is probably representitive of something rather than taking it literally. If you like Lynch's other works and haven't seen this yet, it is not to be missed. If you like strange movies that get you thinking, then also give it a go but be warned, this is not a movie for everyone!
  • entirelytoomuch
    November 18, 2009
    entirelytoomuch
    Well, I was prepared for it well enough that I didn't hate it as much as I could have, but I can't say that I liked it. It's easily the most messed-up movie I've ever seen, possibly of all time. I get that he's trying to challenge us by showing us something completely and totally...( read more) disturbing in as many ways as he can get away with on the grounds of it being art, and then putting the human form into it. I don't really have a lot of respect for movies that don't make any effort to make sense though. Really, I feel like it's one thing if you tell a story but leave a part out for the viewer to figure out, but another thing entirely if you intentionally make a movie that doesn't make sense and can't make sense so you leave it up to people to make up what they think happened, and then they go on the internet and assert that they're right and anyone who didn't reach their conclusion is an idiot. True to form, I found a guy on the internet right away raging about how brilliant and great this movie is. It's powerful and striking, and extreme, but that doesn't make it good. Anyway, very disturbing, definitely not for everyone (in fact, this movie is not for almost anyone), but just barely art, so it can get away with it.
  • ythelastman89
    November 17, 2009
    ythelastman89
    The most bizarre movie I think I've ever seen. David Lynch gives a future to us that no one in their right mind would want to live in. It's just a film experience like no other. I can't really compare it to any other movie because it's just so unique. Jack Nance is priceless, he ...( read more)gives the movie such an earnest personality that is part of the reason it is so amazing. From dead fetuses getting slammed against the wall to chickens cumming blood, it's never stale or dull. I think the fact that it is still untouched after all these is a true testament to the unique nature of the film.
  • mushuplus
    November 15, 2009
    mushuplus
    creepy and very disturbing.
  • stephen260
    November 15, 2009
    stephen260
    This is a must watch again and again.
  • jackgbowman
    November 13, 2009
    jackgbowman
    first major work by David Lynch and a true serreal classic .

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Comments

  • fooooo
    September 28, 2008
    fooooo
    o_O
  • Riverfan93
    December 29, 2007
    Riverfan93
    I want to see this movie really bad!!!! But, I can't find it anywhere to rent. It sounded really good when I read the plot. Oh well, I might just have to go buy it somewhere.
  • j0hnblade
    June 8, 2007
    j0hnblade
    greatest lynch movie, mulholland drive comes second :)
  • vitara444
    April 27, 2007
    vitara444
    can any 1 help me i have tryed for hours to try and find the soundtrack (in heaven ) by eraserhead can any 1 send it yo me or email me a link to this soundtrack my email address is vitara444@yahoo.co.uk thank you

    paul
  • bluehawk2008
    March 16, 2007
    bluehawk2008
    I think we can all agree that when his eraser filings are brushed off the table, we all shed a little tear ;)
  • yeyopharmer
    August 30, 2006
    yeyopharmer
    A very complicated film that needs multple viewings... But it's still a cult classic with a unique atmosphere! A must-see for David Lynch fans.
  • tricycledeath
    June 26, 2006
    tricycledeath
    This is absolutely stunning! amazing cinematography! blissfully droning and abrasive!
    One of my favourite films.

    Yeah i agree everyone has a different interpretation, thats one reason why david lynch's films are so powerful.

    I see eraserhead as being about george's fear of getting his girlfriend pregnant. She does but not by him. And his fears come true, manifested as the baby, and the effects on his life, e.g. being forced into marriage.you'll see! you'll see!
  • mylesdolphin
    June 13, 2006
    mylesdolphin
    I agree. This is also one of my favorite movies...of course not for the dialogue or the cinematography. Don't see this movie for that...watch it for its creativity and weirdness...and don't try to understand it because everyone has a different interpretation!
  • sillygirll
    June 13, 2006
    sillygirll
    creepy and kooky to the extreme, lynch's mind is fascinating and this film is a cross-examination of it. can't be described as surrealist cuz there's too much theory and meaning to be derived here, but this film can most aptly be defined as art.

    a film for people who like to think, especially about existence and morality, or would just enjoy watching a man get his head knocked off by a phallus and made into pencil-top erasers, ha!

    trippy in an intelligent way.
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Eraserhead Trivia

  • After seeing the movie Eraserhead, George Lucas asked this director to direct Return of the Jedi, but was turned down.  Answer »
  • Name the director of these films; "Wild at Heart", "Blue Velvet", "Eraserhead" and "Mulholland Drive".  Answer »
  • A movie critic once stated that the movie Begotten "[Made] Eraserhead look like Ernest Saves Christmas."  Answer »
  • What film belongs to this tagline: "In Heaven Everything Is Fine."  Answer »
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