Eraserhead is a 1977 American horror film written, directed, produced, and edited by David Lynch in his feature-length directorial debut. Lynch also created its score and sound design, which included pieces by a variety of other musicians. Shot in black and white and surrealist style, the independent film was Lynch's first feature-length effort following several short films. Starring Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Jeanne Bates, Judith Anna Roberts, Laurel Near, and Jack Fisk, it tells the story of a man (Nance) who is left to care for his grossly deformed child in a desolate industrial landscape.
Eraserhead was produced with the assistance of the American Film Institute (AFI) during Lynch's time studying there. It nonetheless spent several years in principal photography because of funding difficulties; donations from Fisk and his wife Sissy Spacek as well as Nance's wife and crew member Catherine Coulson kept production afloat. It was shot on several locations owned by the AFI in California, including Greystone Mansion, and a set of disused stables in which Lynch lived. Lynch and sound designer Alan Splet spent a year working on the film's audio after their studio was soundproofed. The soundtrack features organ music by Fats Waller and includes the song "In Heaven", written and performed for the film by Peter Ivers, with lyrics by Lynch.
Initially opening to small audiences and little interest, Eraserhead gained popularity over several long runs as a midnight movie. Since its release, it has received widespread acclaim from critics and has been considered a cult film, a cornerstone of independent cinema and reinvigorated the midnight movie tradition. Its surrealist imagery and sexual undercurrents have been seen as key thematic elements, and its intricate sound design as its technical highlight. In 2004, the film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Plot
Henry Spencer's face appears superimposed over a planet in space. He opens his mouth and a spermatozoon-like creature emerges. A man inside the planet moves a set of levers, and the creature is flushed away.
In an industrial cityscape, Henry walks home with his groceries. He is stopped outside his apartment by a woman across the hall, who informs him that his girlfriend, Mary, has invited him to dinner with her family. Henry leaves his groceries in his apartment, which is filled with piles of dirt and dead plants. That night, Henry visits Mary's home, conversing awkwardly with her mother. At the dinner table, he is asked to carve a Cornish game hen; the bird moves and writhes on the plate and gushes blood when cut. After dinner, Henry is cornered by Mary's mother, who tries to kiss him. She tells him that Mary has had his child and that the two must wed. This causes Henry to have a nose bleed. However, Mary is not sure if what she bore is a child.
The couple moves into Henry's one-room apartment and begins caring for the child, a swaddled bundle with an inhuman face that resembles the spermatozoon creature seen earlier. The infant refuses all food and cries incessantly and intolerably. The sound drives Mary hysterical, and she leaves Henry and the child. Henry attempts to care for the child, and he learns that it struggles to breathe and has developed painful sores on its skin.
Henry begins experiencing visions, again seeing the man in the planet, as well as a lady who inhabits his radiator and stomps more of the sperm creatures. After a sexual encounter with the girl across the hall, he has another vision in which the lady in the radiator sings ("In Heaven"), and his head pops off his body while he is fidgeting, replaced by the baby's crying head. Henry's disembodied head falls from the sky, landing on a street and breaking open. A boy finds it and takes it to a pencil factory to be turned into erasers.
Awakened, Henry seeks out the girl across the hall, but finds her with another man. Crushed, Henry returns to his room. He takes a pair of scissors and for the first time removes the child's swaddling clothes. It is revealed that the child has no skin; the bandages held its internal organs together, which proceed to spill out after the bandages are cut. The child gasps in pain, and Henry stabs its organs with the scissors. The wounds gush a thick liquid, covering the child. The power in the room overloads, causing the lights to flicker; as they flick on and off the child grows to huge proportions. As the lights burn out completely, the child's head is replaced by the planet seen at the beginning. Henry appears amidst a billowing cloud of eraser shavings. The side of the planet bursts apart and the man inside struggles with his levers, which emit sparks. Henry is embraced warmly by the lady in the radiator in a white void.
Cast
Production Pre-production
Writer and director David Lynch had previously studied for a career as a painter, and he had created several short films to animate his paintings. By 1970, however, he had switched his focus to film-making, and at the age of 24 he accepted a scholarship at the American Film Institute's Center for Advanced Film Studies. Lynch disliked the course and considered dropping out, but after being offered the chance to produce a script of his own devising, he changed his mind. He was given permission to use the school's entire campus for film sets; he converted the school's disused stables into a series of sets and lived there. In addition, Greystone Mansion, also owned by the AFI, was used for many scenes.
Lynch had initially begun work on a script titled Gardenback, based on his painting of a hunched figure with vegetation growing from its back. Gardenback was a surrealist script about adultery, which featured a continually growing insect representing one man's lust for his neighbor. The script would have resulted in a roughly 45-minute-long film, which the AFI felt was too long for such a figurative, nonlinear script. In its place, Lynch presented Eraserhead, which he had developed based on a daydream of a man's head being taken to a pencil factory by a small boy. Several board members at the AFI were still opposed to producing such a surrealist work, but they acquiesced when Dean Frank Daniel threatened to resign if it was vetoed. Lynch's script for Eraserhead was influenced by his reading as a film student; Franz Kafka's 1915 novella The Metamorphosis and Nikolai Gogol's 1836 short story "The Nose" were strong influences on the screenplay. Lynch also confirmed in an interview with Metro Silicon Valley that the film "came together" when he opened up a Bible, read one verse from it, and shut it; in retrospect, Lynch could not remember if the verse was from the Old Testament or the New Testament. In 2007, Lynch said "Believe it or not, Eraserhead is my most spiritual film." Lynch refused to elaborate on his statement when pressed.
The script is also thought to have been inspired by Lynch's fear of fatherhood; his daughter Jennifer had been born with "severely clubbed feet", requiring extensive corrective surgery as a child. Jennifer has said that her own unexpected conception and birth defects were the basis for the film's themes. The film's tone was also shaped by Lynch's time living in a troubled neighborhood in Philadelphia. Lynch and his family spent five years living in an atmosphere of "violence, hate and filth". The area was described as a "crime-ridden poverty zone", which inspired the urban backdrop of Eraserhead. Describing this period of his life, Lynch said, "I saw so many things in Philadelphia I couldn't believe ... I saw a grown woman grab her breasts and speak like a baby, complaining her nipples hurt. This kind of thing will set you back". In his book David Lynch: Beautiful Dark, film critic Greg Olson posits that this time contrasted starkly with the director's childhood in the Pacific Northwest, giving the director a "bipolar, Heaven-and-Hell vision of America" which has subsequently shaped his films.
Initial casting for the film began in 1971, and Jack Nance was quickly selected for the lead role. However, the staff at the AFI had underestimated the project's scale—they had initially green-lit Eraserhead after viewing a twenty-one page screenplay, assuming that the film industry's usual ratio of one minute of film per scripted page would reduce the film to approximately twenty minutes. This misunderstanding, coupled with Lynch's own meticulous direction, caused the film to remain in production for a number of years. In an extreme example of this labored schedule, one scene in the film begins with Nance's character opening a door—a full year passed before he was filmed entering the room. Nance, however, was dedicated to producing the film and retained the unorthodox hairstyle his character sported for the entirety of its gestation.
Filming Buoyed with regular donations from Lynch's childhood friend Jack Fisk and Fisk's wife Sissy Spacek, production continued for five years as Lynch kept running out of money. Additional funds were provided by Nance's wife Catherine E. Coulson, who worked as a waitress and donated her income, and by Lynch himself, who delivered newspapers throughout the film's principal photography. During one of the many lulls in filming, Lynch was able to produce the short film The Amputee, taking advantage of the AFI's wish to test new film stock before committing to bulk purchases. The short piece starred Coulson, who continued working with Lynch as a technician on Eraserhead. Eraserhead production crew was very small, composed of Lynch; sound designer Alan Splet; cinematographer Herb Cardwell, who left the production for financial reasons and was replaced with Frederick Elmes; production manager and prop technician Doreen Small; and Coulson, who worked in a variety of roles.
The physical effects used to create the deformed child have been kept secret. The projectionist who worked on the film's dailies was blindfolded by Lynch to avoid revealing the prop's nature, and he refused to discuss the effects in subsequent interviews. The prop—which Nance nicknamed "Spike"—featured several working parts; its neck, eyes and mouth were capable of independent operation. Lynch has offered cryptic comments on the prop, at times stating that "it was born nearby" or "maybe it was found". It has been speculated by The Guardian John Patterson that the prop may have been constructed from a skinned rabbit or a lamb fetus. The child has been seen as a precursor to elements of other Lynch films, such as John Merrick's make-up in 1980's The Elephant Man and the sandworms of 1984's Dune.
During production, Lynch began experimenting with a technique of recording dialogue that had been spoken phonetically backwards and reversing the resulting audio. Although the technique was not used in the film, Lynch returned to it for "Episode 2", the third episode of his 1990 television series Twin Peaks. Lynch also began his interest in transcendental meditation during the film's production, adopting a vegetarian diet and giving up smoking and alcohol.
Post-production Lynch worked with Alan Splet to design the film's sound. The pair arranged and fabricated soundproof blanketing to insulate their studio, where they spent almost a year creating and editing the film's sound effects. The soundtrack is densely layered, including as many as fifteen different sounds played simultaneously using multiple reels. Sounds were created in a variety of ways—for a scene in which a bed slowly dissolves into a pool of liquid, Lynch and Splet inserted a microphone inside a plastic bottle, floated it in a bathtub, and recorded the sound of air blown through the bottle. After being recorded, sounds were further augmented by alterations to their pitch, reverb, and frequency.