Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10480 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-01-01
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Formats: Black & White, PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 85 minutes

Special Features
English
Region 2

Synopsis
Director David Lynch's feature-film debut is a masterpiece of the macabre and grotesque. Reportedly a reaction to the news that he was about to become a father, Lynch's ERASERHEAD follows a sensitive young man as he struggles to cope with impending parenthood. Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) lives in a hopeless industrial landscape, lusting after the beautiful woman who lives in the apartment across the hall. After his girlfriend, Mary (Charlotte Stewart), informs him of her pregnancy, he is forced to eat dinner with her extremely odd family. The baby is eventually born, only it isn't a human baby at all; it's a deformed creature that resembles a lizard. The baby won't stop crying, a horrifyingly piercing wail that drives Mary insane. Left alone with the baby, Henry is serenaded by a woman who lives inside his radiator, and soon he decides to murder his baby in order to stop the nightmare once and for all. Five years in the making, ERASERHEAD contains all of the trademark attributes of a Lynch film--haunting visuals, an ethereal score, unsettling sound design, and, most notably, a black sense of humor--creating a world onscreen that is exhilarating, terrifying, and unique.

Customer Reviews

The realm of REM
Why use a lot of words to describe a motion picture that visualizes the subconscious? Suffice it to say that this is still David Lynch's best. An oneiric odyssey, the sort of troubling, never-ending dream one can have when suffering from a high fever, in which the most bizarre and seemingly hopeless situations nearly drive one to despair. So far, I've never seen another film evoking that sort of atmosphere so well. Strange yet familiar. Archetypal. ERASERHEAD is a unique work of art, a milestone in cinema. Don't try to understand or explain this film, open up your mind and simply undergo it, visit the dream world while being awake. An exceptional experience.

Disturbing Horror
Henry (Jack Nance) lives in a grim apartment in a Hellish industrial nightmare. When his peculiar girlfriend gives birth to his mutant lizard baby, Henry struggles to cope with the responsibilities of fatherhood.

Eraserhead is, without doubt, the most disturbing film I have ever seen. It's like watching your most intense bad dream on film. David Lynch has translated absolute discomfort and fear so vividly into a film that I don't ever want to watch it again. It's a film that you can't really enjoy on any level but I think that it leaves such an impression that it truly is a piece of art. It repulsed me but I'd rather be repulsed than feel nothing. From the weird radiator woman to the live chicken dinner, I still have no idea what the film is actually about but I can't forget it either. Truly original.

Like this? Try: Blue Velvet

not to everyone's taste
Saw another review on here and just felt compelled to write.

I am not going to review the film as such - just comment on something that David Lynch has been consistenly able to do in just about every film I have ever watched of his (besides, perhaps, the lyrical and generally just downright pleasant "Straight Story").
Unnerving the viewer with the apparently trivial. Many people bandy about the phrase "surreal" without having a true idea of what it means. In fact, the "surrealist" movement in itself (it could be argued) became something of a parody of what it started out as. Take that lobster-as-telephone "work-of-art". It's nothing more than the ridiculous juxtaposition of two apparently incongruous objects. No more, no less. Similarly with most of Dali's work. Randomly placed objects in a slightly odd landscape. These are not, if we are going to be brutally frank, the depictions of the subconscious made solid. Which is what surrealism stood for originally. No. These are more like crazy images bunged together to cause slight shock and maybe some discussion. "Eraserhead" meanwhile, is the genuine, bona-fide real deal.
You know that feeling you get when you wake up and that last remnant of unease from a nightmare has not quite left you? You know how sometimes when that happens and you look around your room, something about your room just doesn't feel right? And then you spend about half an hour trying to get to sleep but you can't because all you can think about is that there is definitely something wrong but you don't know what it is? That worrying niggle. That indefinable sense of....wrongness. That's what Lynch captures. And not wrong like - hey there's an elephant in my wardrobe talking to Henry Kissinger! Just a general feeling of wrongness. A bit like William Burroughs' naked lunch moment.

When I saw "Eraserhead" for the first time, I left the cinema thinking "That man has just shown me my own nightmares". Not literally. And not the Hollywood nightmares of sooo many other films. But just that quality of a nightmare - something that only your subconscious is dealing with. No other film-maker has managed it (although the soft-toys coming alive and forming bigger soft-toys in Akira comes close). No other film maker. At all. Why? Because no other film-maker starts with a feeling then builds everything else around it. So what if his films are often impenetrable to the point of frustration? I'll keep watching them just so long as he keeps managing to capture what really ought to be uncapturable.