Eraserhead: The beginning

When he finished high school, David Lynch moved to Philadelphia, a town that he later would go on to admit was his biggest influence. Philadelphia's mostly grey and sorrowful weather mostly influenced Lynch's first full-length movie: Eraserhead.

A tale about a man who is absolutely lost in a chaotic world, Eraserhead was itself born out of pure chaos. It was filmed during Lynch's college years, and it took five years to complete. He lacked the budget, the time and the experience a movie as ambitious and as independent as this requires to be made. For the last two years of this film's production, Lynch went through a horrible divorce from his first wife, and that stressed him and added many years to his life. In the end, the movie premiered in 1977, and was met with criticcal acclaim.

Eraserhead tells the story of Henry Spencer, a depressed and melancholic man that lives in a nightmarish world that closely resembles ours. When he finds out he is going to be a father, his whole world changes, and when his newly born son ends up being a little monster, Henry Spencer will have to change his whole life in order to keep on living.

The movie combines intimate themes of parenthood and the inherent scariness that comes with growing up with horrific imagery that seems to be taken out of a Lovecraft short story. It is both a horror movie and a love story between a scared man that cannot adapt himself to the scary world surrounding him and a woman that is just trying to live in peace. It is reccomended by everyone and it stands today as one of the biggest examples of great independent filmmaking.