Avidavr: Media Reviews

Tag: Eraserhead

  • The Film-of-the-Week Horror Odyssey 2025: Summary and Thoughts

    A personal archeology of fear: what I unearthed in fifteen first-time horrors.

    I’m ending the project at 15 movies. My goal was 16, but the season is long over, and I’m itching to watch other movies.

    What have we learned?

    There was a French horror movie that was basically as important as Psycho.

    Eyes Without a Face proposes that a face transplant is as simple as cutting around the outside of someone’s face with a scalpel and lifting the skin off like a Halloween mask. I don’t think the procedure is quite that simple, but the movie shows it in its entirety, and the only thing keeping you from fainting is pure disbelief (or hope) that it wouldn’t work that easily.

    In 1960, this was shocking enough to make some audience members pass out—and probably caused a few to wish they could.

    It was one of the first films to make the respected father the villain, even a killer. If that doesn’t equate to brilliance, it comes close.

    The Best and Worst Zombie Movies Since 1980

    By sheer luck, I watched both the best zombie movie made since 1980 and the worst.

    28 Years Later was the first in the series that felt like a true “franchise picture” in the best meaning of the phrase. It’s not really about the rage virus—it’s about losing a parent to cancer. The score by Young Fathers (virtually unknown in the U.S., semi-popular in the U.K., and respected everywhere else) is phenomenal. The “tower of skulls,” a modern mausoleum for treasured loved ones, is instantly iconic. The characters actually do know how to handle fast zombies, but the threat becomes the backdrop for a story about people who only have their families left.

    World War Z, on the other hand, is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Expensive-looking, hollow at every level, and completely neutered by its PG-13 rating. The zombie virus seems to spread through aura or osmosis. No one ever actually gets bitten on screen, yet everyone instantly looks like they’ve been rotting for a month. How does that even work?

    Every scene is a problem except for the car chase.

    Eraserhead and The Lighthouse: Two Triumphs

    Eraserhead was another highlight. It’s the movie that inspired half the 1980s cult creature-features. Poor Henry’s life is staring at a brick wall outside his bedroom window while his mutant baby screams in the next room. His partner is gone; she couldn’t take it anymore.

    It’s brilliant—part Cronenberg, part Twin Peaks, part stop-motion nightmare—and possibly the biggest spiritual influence on Beetlejuice. Next time I see this playing at midnight somewhere, I’m going.

    Almost as good was Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse. Hallelujah: I finally liked one of his movies as much as people say I should. The “lighthouse drives men mad” trope deserved a full exploration, and this one dives straight into mythology, sea legends, and Cthulhu-adjacent imagery. The lighthouse setting itself is spectacular. You’ll see more of these in the future—there have already been two: this and The Vanishing from a year earlier.

    The Creature, The Camp, and The Witches

    After those, I recommend Creature from the Black Lagoon. Not respected enough then or now, but the monster’s theme music is one of the best ever written (alongside Bride of Frankenstein). The editing, music, and cinematography could have made this a masterpiece, if the script hadn’t seemed like it was written in a weekend.

    Friday the 13th was almost brilliant—for half an hour. It feels like it was written by a playwright trying to compete with Halloween, but lost a tug-of-war with producers who just wanted something fast and sellable. It’s preposterous, but believable enough that the silliness becomes irritating. The score is as good as Creature’s for the first 30 minutes, then even the editor gets bored of it.

    And The Witches—the makeup work by Jim Henson’s team on Anjelica Huston is indelible. Huston never became the next Meryl Streep, but this is a role no one else would’ve played that way. I didn’t show the full getup in my review because seeing it for the first time is the reason you pay for admission. The mouse work feels like an afterthought, but everything else? The mouse work feels like an afterthought, but everything else? Burned into the psyche of every kid whose parents mistakenly took them.

    And Then There Was Midsommar

    The other lowlight was Midsommar. In some ways brilliant, in most ways incoherent. It did, however, introduce me to the Swedish folklore of elderly people jumping off a cliff once they became a burden. (Folklore only, but compelling enough for a filmmaker to say: “Okay… make this a movie.”)

    It’s the Tokyo Story or Make Way for Tomorrow of human-sacrifice rituals, but the execution is a B- for the assignment. A C overall.

    —

    Horror Movies Seen for the First Time in 2025 (ranked)

    1 Eyes Without a Face (1960) – 9.5

    2 Possession (1981) – 9

    3 Eraserhead (1977) – 9

    4 28 Years Later (2025) – 9

    5 Strange Darling (2023) – 8.5

    6 The Lighthouse (2019) – 8.5

    7 Onibaba (1964) – 8

    8 House (1977) – 8

    9 Creature of the Black Lagoon (1954) – 8

    10 The Stepford Wives (1975) – 8

    11 Weapons (2025) – 7.5

    12 Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025) – 7.5

    13 Sinners (2025) – 7.5

    14 Train to Busan (2016) – 7.5

    15 Revenge (2017) – 7

    16 The Witches (1990) – 7

    17 Night of the Creeps (1986) – 7

    18 I Saw the TV Glow (2024) – 7

    19 Ringu (1988) – 7

    20 The Invitation (2017) – 7

    21 X (2022) – 7

    22 Possessor (2020) – 7

    23 Paranormal Activity (2007) – 6.5

    24 Nosferatu (2024) – 6.5

    25 Heretic (2024) – 6.5

    26 Mandy (2018) – 6.5

    27 Blade II (2002) – 6

    28 Dead Calm (1989) – 6

    29 Frankenstein (2025) – 6

    30 Arcadia (2024) – 6

    31 Cube (1997) – 5.5

    32 28 Weeks Later (2007) – 5

    33 Midsommar (2019) – 5

    34 Scream (2022) – 5

    35 Friday the 13th (1980) – 5

    36 Death of a Unicorn (2025) – 5

    37 The Conjuring (2013) – 4.5

    38 Longlegs (2024) – 4

    39 The Endless (2017) – 4

    40 The Coffee Table (2022) – 4

    41 House on Haunted Hill (1959) – 3

    42 Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) – 2.5

    43 World War Z (2013) – 1

    —

    Twenty horror movies on my docket for October 2026 (if not before then):

    Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)

    Cat People (1942)

    What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

    Pirhana (1978)

    The Changeling (1980)

    The Howling (1981)

    Tenabrae (1984)

    Critters (1986)

    Monkey Shines (1988)

    Jacob’s Ladder (1990)

    Saw (2004)

    The Orphanage (2007)

    It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012)

    A Monster Calls (2016)

    Under the Shadow (2016)

    The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

    Halloween (2018)

    The Wolf House (2018)

    Oddity (2024)

    Dangerous Animals (2025)

    —

    Final Thoughts

    Of those upcoming films, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Cat People are the ones I wish I’d squeezed in this year. I always hope to find new personal classics, but it’s rare that any actually qualify.

    I also recommend Sinners and Weapons, two mainstream horror films that might even be nominated for Best Picture next year. I’d give them both a 7.5—which for me qualifies as a personal classic, just barely.

    Every October feels like a tunnel you walk into, hoping something in the dark will change you. The best horror isn’t about fear at all; it’s about seeing the ordinary world more clearly afterward. Give me truth, memorably distorted and I’m a happy Crystal Lake camper.

    The full list of reviews are here.

  • Day 4: Eraserhead (1977)

    Goal: Find a horror movie I am embarrassed to have never seen.


    Eraserhead (1977)

    What I know about it:
    A black and white horror movie from the same guy that did Twin Peaks and Mulholland Dr. RIP. This has a very strange trailer that I can’t remember, and I saw it last week. Long static shots of a guy with a high-cut hairstyle looking blankly at the camera. Ok, now I’ll read the premise on IMDb.

    So this is a survival movie. “Henry Spencer tries to survive the screams of his newborn mutant child.” Shouldn’t those adjectives be in reverse order? Does Henry have a mutant newborn child, or does he have a newborn mutant child? Describing the child like that makes it sound like some sort of irregular baseball card, or like he came with a set of superhero clothes. “Mutant Child here! Now with a detachable umbilical cord and noise chip!”

    As someone who regularly saw the grosses for midnight movies nationwide, this was one of the standards, particularly in New York and California. If you specifically like watching cult or midnight films, you have already knocked this off your list long ago. I don’t know what it is, but it’s the type of movie that I want to know as little about as possible.


    —

    After the movie:
    Hair in the 1970s. You couldn’t mess with it. Today, if someone looked in the mirror and said, “You know, my hair kind of looks like a pencil eraser,” they would then get clippers and a pair of scissors and cut it down until it seems like the average length trending right now. But in 1976, that length was inches, which equated to a white man afro on some unlucky men. So all you could do was look out the bedroom window from the fetal position and sulk.


    The terminology “newborn mutant baby” is definitely accurate. It isn’t a mutated normal baby. It is a normal mutant baby, with a head that looks curiously like a human elbow. David Lynch deserves some sort of medal for comedy for playing such a long game for such a minor joke. Blink and you’ll miss it.

    I watched this with Josh, who seemed to mostly agree with me on Dead Calm. With Eraserhead, he realized it was boring and considered leaving 30 minutes in. “This movie is just *dull*. People in 1977 watched this because there wasn’t anything else to do.” He never left the room and watched the screen the entire time. He said he kept waiting for it to get better, although I think just enough new things happened to—not keep him interested, maybe—but to keep him from becoming bored out of his mind.

    I realized while watching this: mostly, this was an extremely influential movie for certain directors. It is clear that Barton Fink, which won the Palme d’Or in 1991, was about 70% Eraserhead when the Coen Brothers thought out what to do for their fourth feature film. Is it a drama? Thriller? Comedy? The decision to give it the biggest award was unanimous, which is as if they were saying, “Bravo. We saw Eraserhead, too.”


    This was pre–the mutated creature film boom of the late 70s and 80s, from directors David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Joe Dante, Ridley Scott, et al. The stop-motion and practical effects were influential on many 1980s films. David Lynch figured out how to take the effects used in Jason and the Argonauts and claymation movies and do them on a next-to-nothing budget. The sequences don’t last long, but the effect feels straight out of Beetlejuice a decade later. The body imagery, which includes a rib cage split open, feels right out of John Carpenter’s The Thing.

    If the film is about anything, it is the crushing routine and existence of working-class, industrialized city life. Henry Spencer lies down and looks out his bedroom window, and then we cut to his perspective and see what it is he sees. When someone’s bedroom has a contender for “world’s worst view,” I always think, “How did he get stuck here? Henry must be the worst person alive at finding a job. Or the worst at finding an apartment.”


    I always assumed Angelo Badalamenti specialized in 1950s jukebox-style music, which is where the strange lounge act aesthetic came from in Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, et al. But no. That seems to mostly be Lynch’s idea as the origin point. The song here, “In Heaven,” was mostly written by the man himself. I like to think he started with this idea just to find something absurd to be “the mutant squish-y” song, and then he just decided to keep that style and really commit. The Twin Peaks aesthetic started here, in this bizarre, dark horror movie that no one was supposed to see.

    Because Eraserhead is must-see cinema. For anyone who grew to love David Lynch for Twin Peaks or Mulholland Dr., this is where a surprising amount of his craft was first seen. I could name 30 movies now considered classics released in the next 20 years that were directly indebted to Eraserhead. The entire 1980s cult movie genre was trying to be the next Eraserhead!

    9/10