David Lynch's head is one crazy beautiful place. This short film is an early nightmare turned into art. Poetry with chalky feelings and no morning dews.

How was this possible in 1970? When Hitchcock was still the guidance to follow suit --remember Coppola's underrated Dementia 13 (1963) or Polanski's Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary's Baby (1968)--, Lynch retreated to more primitive impulses and began the development of a new kind of horror.

I can even see the seeds of Goth giving birth to Tim Burton as if he was one of the characters originating from enormous alien plants, its tortured roots getting wet in the polluted air of a dark room.

Freud and Breton hand in hand, sliding to the abyss…

Early Lynch that pretty much sums up the rest of his career, The Grandmother is an essential viewing in the contemporary Surrealist master's filmography. Blending a deranged form of animation with blacked out live action sets, the film is the epitome of a celluloid nightmare. While the content is nothing particularly horrifying, Lynch finds a way to unsettle and disturb with thick atmosphere and absurd imagery.

The great aspect about Lynch's brand of cinema is his surrealism can be taken solely at a surface level and to just experience the madness or if one should choose to dig deeper his films always have multiple interpretations to be found. This early example is more cut and dry with a couple of…

Another entry in Lynch by Inch: David Lynch, Ranked.

Basically every element of Eraserhead is right here, in this film. The suits, the shadows, the stiff movements, the natal trauma, the proscenium arches, the abrasive Alan Splet soundscape, the jowly woman who offers a brief shaft of light in a horrible world, even the odd fascination with little piles of soil - all present and correct. I haven't seen The Amputee, the short Lynch made in between this and Eraserhead, but I'm struggling to imagine how it would be necessary. Everything's in place right now.

The Grandmother is highly necessary, as much in what it gets wrong as what it gets right. Some of its shadows are murky even by…

If David Lynch wanted to kill me I think I'd let him.

Something I hear a lot when reading about David Lynch is a sentence along the lines of "I'd be afraid to meet David Lynch/pick his mind/exist in his world." But one of my absolute most favorite things about David Lynch is how, in everything he's written or interview he's given, he seems like one of the most kind and patient and quietly intelligent (unless you ask him whether you can watch a movie on a smartphone) people around. That someone who comes across as so kind and soothing can conjure such nightmarish images is one of the many things I love about him.

And what images! The Grandmother…

Well this is definitely embryonic and unpolished. The rough outline of the plot is one of child abuse, child neglect, the escape into the loving embrace of a grandmother, and then the inevitable grief which follows such a relationship. I always wonder with arthouse films, why has the director chosen to use this method to communicate their ideas. Here I think it's simply due to the ideas and emotions being so unformed and elusive for many young people, that a confusing morass of shapes, sounds, and images is the perfect medium to communicate them. We're transported into the incoherent fantasy world of the boy, where everything is black and void, where parental figures snap and bark wildly, and the genesis…