David Lynch
305 connections found
Filmography
Blue Velvet 1986 
Mulholland Drive 2001 
Lost Highway 1997 
Inland Empire 2006 
The Elephant Man 1980 
Eraserhead 1977 
The Grandmother 1970 
The Straight Story 1999 
Wild at Heart 1990 
Dune 1984 
Twin Peaks 1989 
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me 1992 
The Amputee 1974 
Six Men Getting Sick 1967 
The Alphabet 1969 
Rabbits 2002 View:
Connections, in both directions
Jodorowsky's Dune (2013)
Directed by Frank Pavich
influenced by Dune (1984), Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986), The Elephant Man (1980)
Plot
His strenuous efforts to produce “the greatest movie never made” are recounted in Frank Pavich’s fascinating new documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune , which is now playing theatrically in Los Angeles and New York City and opening in other cities next month.
One of the highlights of the documentary is Jodorowsky remembering, with a devil's grin, what it was like to hear that Lynch, a director he greatly admired, had been tapped to do "Dune" on screen.
Before David Lynch spectacularly botched a bigscreen adaptation of Frank Herbert ’s “Dune,” Alejandro Jodorowsky , cinema’s shaman of psychedelia, had a spectacular go at the job.
In 1975, following the runaway success of his art-house freak-outs El Topo and Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky secured the rights to Frank Herbert's Dune - and began work on what was gearing up to be a cinematic game-changer, a sci-fi epic unlike anything the world had ever seen.
There are some nice touches—including psycho-visuals to illustrate F/X head Dan O’Bannon’s freaky recollection of meeting Jodorowsky—but Jodorowsky’s Dune is all a bit much: too much of a muchness; too much hypo-hype; too much obsessing over what will never be.
Entertaining from its first outrageous pronouncement of messianic intent to its final concept painting of a reticulated spaceship spilling outer-space spice from a shattered cargo hold, the documentary "Jodorowsky's Dune" is determined to convince you that cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky's doomed 1970s adaptation of Frank Herbert's science-fiction novel "Dune" really is "the greatest movie never made."
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour
influenced by Eraserhead (1977), Wild at Heart (1990)
Visuals Music
This is a special film, one inspired by but not beholden to comics, graphic novels and the films of David Lynch, in particular Eraserhead.
There’s a bit of Eraserhead in here, and some early Jim Jarmusch: The story may be spare and familiar, but the characters’ submersion invests each moment with an oblique mystery.
It reminded me of watching “Stranger Than Paradise” or “Eraserhead” for the first time (two movies Amirpour has clearly seen) and having that feeling that boils down to “The person who made this is really cool.”
Like vintage Jim Jarmusch, or David Lynch's Eraserhead.
And reminiscent of “Eraserhead” and early Jim Jarmusch.
The the film’s spare-but-layered sound design is reminiscent of Eraserhead, and its haunted, dreamy 1950s quality otherwise evokes David Lynch, when it isn’t calling on Jarmusch.
Aronofsky's startlingly original debut recalls the inspirational fervour of Eraserhead, as it constructs a paranoid vision from b/w cinematography, a pounding score, and flashes of sheer hallucinatory weirdness.
To get an idea of the director in case you have never seen him before, imagine the cinematography originality of Jim Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise mixed with the perfect dialogue of Kevin Smith 's Clerks and the bizarre and cryptic storyline of David Lynch's Eraserhead .
Aronofsky's rapid cutting keeps the pace up and many of his visuals are genuinely unsettling - Max's hallucinations during his brutal headaches are reminiscent of David Lynch's equally disturbing feature debut " Eraserhead ".
It's a bizarre premise, and the film's odd black-and-white look recalls David Lynch's surreal fantasy "Eraserhead."
Anyway, it was here that 28-year-old Darren Aronofsky earned the Filmmakers Award and plenty of critical acclaim for Pi, a sort of mad scientist psychodrama shot through with the grisly speed of the Japanese cyberpunk shocker Tetsuo and the DIY dread of David Lynch 's Eraserhead.
Aronofsky relies too much on surreal nods to David Lynch’s "Eraserhead" when he could have explored more of the social implications of pi.
Under the Silver Lake (2018)
Directed by David Robert Mitchell
influenced by Mulholland Drive (2001), Lost Highway (1997)
Themes Plot
It’s no Mulholland Drive, but the point of Under the Silver Lake rhymes with themes from David Lynch’s masterpiece: that lifetimes of watching others has instructed us in how to be watched ourselves.
You see, Mitchell is attempting to transform what might sound like a routine search for a missing woman into a surreal journey through a wormhole Hollywood, one chock-full of allusions to old movies, from Hitchcock and The Long Goodbye to Inherent Vice and especially Mulholland Drive (David Lynch’s presence looms over the whole film).
Janet Gaynor es la actriz favorita de la madre del protagonista de Lo que esconde Silver Lake, película que propone un viaje a través del espejo de la Meca del Cine de la mano (o bajo la influencia) de guías tan diversos como Anger, David Lynch –en particular el de Mulholland Drive (2001)-, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Kim Deitch, Thomas Pynchon, Foster Wallace y Robert W. Chambers, entre otros.
The mix of high and lowbrow makes little sense, as if Robert Mitchell watched Mulholland Drive and Inherent Vice and his biggest complaint was you couldn’t get stoned watching them.
Easier to follow than Paul Thomas Anderson’s bumbling “Inherent Vice” but less masterful in thematic execution than David Lynch’s enigmatic “Mulholland Drive,” “Under the Silver Lake” is a mystery predicated on bored fixation.
Under The Silver Lake goes both to places other films have gone before (think: Mulholland Drive) as well as places that are definitely… different.
The Double (2014)
Directed by Richard Ayoade
influenced by Eraserhead (1977), Mulholland Drive (2001)
Visuals
And you sense it in the vivid display of hallucinatory grotesqueness that instantly recalls Lynch’s headscratchers, “Eraserhead” and “Mulholland Drive.”
Yes, it makes seem complex and you might feel like you're sitting through a mind-f*ck at times, but it's not complicated or exhausting like other mindf*cks are (see Mulholland Drive or The Tree of Life for truly nauseating mindf*cks).
Suggested by a Dostoevsky novella, but set in an entirely created world in which only the language makes any reference to the place moviegoers will reenter once they exit the theater, and paying homage to the likes of " Brazil ," Orson Welles ’ "The Trial," and "Eraserhead" within its first five minutes, "The Double" insists upon its bona fides with a will and makes you like it.
The harsh yellow lighting seems ripped from The Element of Crime, while the elliptical structure and the paranoid, desolate design of Simon's world evokes both Eraserhead and The Tenant .
And you sense it in the vivid display of hallucinatory grotesqueness that instantly recalls Lynch’s headscratchers, “Eraserhead” and “Mulholland Drive.”
Anyway, it’s not as if Gilliam’s flawed masterpiece is the only thing on Ayoade’s mind; one could just as easily cite the first “Matrix” movie, “The City of Lost Children,” Michael Radford’s 1984 film of “1984,” David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” and a whole list of 1970s science fiction.
These influences include, but are not limited to: Moebius; David Lynch’s Dune; entry-level critiques of capitalism; the 1980 Flash Gordon movie; Brazil, which gets both a dialogue reference (“27b-stroke-6”) and a Terry Gilliam cameo; spiritual transmigration; personal transformation; transhumanism.
Lana and Andy Wachowski, its moneyed creators, have gone on record saying as much, but such defiance in the face of bloodthirsty chuckleheads is plainly evident from the film itself — a proud, super-expensive, quasi-explicable sci-fi semi-disaster in the vein of “Zardoz” and David Lynch’s “Dune.”
It ultimately reminds of David Lynch's notoriously bloated, overblown 1984 bomb, "Dune," and this is not a comparison which any movie should be thrilled to receive.Jupiter "Please, Call Me Jupe" Jones (Mila Kunis) was born on a ship headed for America, an illegal alien without a home, without a country, and without a father.
Their last film — the ambitious gender-bending and centuries-spanning D.W. Griffith-on-LSD “Cloud Atlas’’ — didn’t hang together as a narrative either, but at least nobody could accuse the Wachowskis of rummaging through the recycling bin for ideas from the likes of David Lynch’s “Dune’’ and their own “Matrix’’ trilogy.
The mythology of Jupiter Ascending reads like a high school book report on Dune by a student who never read the book, but instead got drunk, watched the David Lynch version, and passed out long before Sting showed up in his space underwear.
The plot is a Rubik's Cube of classic Lynchian archetypes culled from the director's entire oeuvre: There's a pair of Hollywood dames at the heart of the story, Betty (Watts), a new arrival to the L.A. basin, who is intent on making her mark in the film world; and the amnesiac Rita (Harring), who takes her name from a Gilda poster because she can't recall her real one.
A poster of Gilda is reflected from a bathroom mirror as the amnesiac adopts more than Hayworth's name.
There are two characters named Betty and Rita who the movie follows through mysterious plot loops, but by the end of the film we aren't even sure they're different characters, and Rita (an amnesiac who lifted the name from a "Gilda" poster) wonders if she's really Diane Selwyn, a name from a waitress' name tag.
The brunette, who quickly adopts the temporary name "Rita" (after Rita Hayworth on a Gilda poster), has lost her memory and seems to be in big trouble.
The latter stumbles down the hillside into Betty's lair, espies a Gilda poster (thus christening herself Ritaas in Rita Hayworth), and the two womenthe ever-optimistic Canadian and the sullenly scared damsel in distressform a fatalistic bond as they begin a feature length investigation attempting to fill in Rita's blank past.
The woman, who eventually calls herself Rita after seeing a poster on the wall for the great romantic film noir Gilda (1946), begs Betty to help her.
The Bride! (2026)
Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal
influenced by Wild at Heart (1990), Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980)
Themes Visuals Plot
…with a side of “Wild at Heart,”…
“Eraserhead,”…
Wild at Heart is probably the best point of comparison — a doomed and complicated couple on a nightmarish yet beautiful road trip. Sure, these ones are literal monsters.
A mix of classic horror and “Bonnie and Clyde,” with a side of “Wild at Heart,”…
David Lynch’s Wild at Heart…
Reconceiving the tale as an art deco, neon-infused, lovers-on-the-run story — as much Wild at Heart as Bonnie & Clyde…
Other movies have incorporated The Wizard of Oz into their fabric, notably Woody Allen's Annie Hall , Martin Scorsese's After Hours and David Lynch's Wild at Heart , not to mention the popular book/Broadway play Wicked, which tells the story from the Wicked Witch's perspective.
Lynch has also felt compelled to douse the movie (which took the prestigious Palme d'Or at Cannes this year) with an unending flood of references to "The Wizard of Oz."
Though far from an intellectual exercise, the film fiddles consciously with big cultural archetypes—Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and The Wizard Of Oz, among others—and with capital-letter depictions of Good and Evil.
Wild at Heart takes the archetypal road movie and adds inventive variations including sexual intrigue, ritual murder, pyromania, dirty talk, an ensemble cast familiar from "Twin Peaks," identification with media icons, and references to The Wizard of Oz.
What Lynch seems to have been going for is a sort of white-trash variation on "The Wizard of Oz" -- one that's been left out in the sun to rot and fester and run lousy with maggots.
But among all the pop-cultural referencing laced throughout Wild At Heart, the most important, noticeable, and constant allusions in the film are the numerous ones pertaining to The Wizard of Oz, with many pieces of dialogue referring to Sailor and Lula’s journey using terminology and imagery from the classic film.
Lost River (2015)
Directed by Ryan Gosling
influenced by Wild at Heart (1990), Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), Eraserhead (1977)
Visuals Themes
Take a little from David Lynch, especially in the noirish club scenes that might have been ripped right out of Mulholland Drive; borrow some of Refn's flair for graphic violence and formless narrative structure; but where is Gosling in all of this?
Desperate to keep her two children in the house they grew up in, she accepts when her scummy bank manager Dave (a standout Ben Mendelsohn) offers her a job in his scary cabaret club - think Mulholland Drive 's Club Silencio, with more mutilation.
Gosling is clearly a student of Mr. Mulholland Dr. He’s also influenced by Harmony Korine, Dario Argento, and his collaborator of recent years, Nicolas Winding Refn.
The stream-of-consciousness effect is somewhat frustrating — but that’s by design, as Gosling seems to be echoing David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” and Francis Coppola’s “Rumble Fish.”
Sure, there are the too-close-for-comfort shadings of Refn, the women-in-distress tableaus of Lynch, and a wholesale burning-house theft from Lost Highway that might be unforgiveable had Lynch not lifted it from Aldrich and Kiss Me Deadly in the first place.
Unlike Lynch's "Lost Highway" (1997), however, Ryan Gosling's debut feature, "Lost River," leaves little to the imagination.
Baby Driver (2017)
Directed by Edgar Wright
influenced by Wild at Heart (1990)
Visuals Characters Themes
From beginning to end, Wright chews through dozens upon dozens of songs, making this seem like one long, epic music video, but here’s the thing: While, yes, this film exists in a very surreal, dreamlike state — think David Lynch’s Wild at Heart and Tony Scott’s True Romance — the action never loses its footing.
Baby’s a lot like rabid B-movie connoisseur Clarence Worley in the Quentin Tarantino-scripted “True Romance,” or fellow Elvis devotee Sailor Ripley in David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart”: Such obsessive characters prove intensely passionate, slightly crazy, and as committed to their women as they are to the quirks that preoccupy them the rest of the time.
From the opening chase — set to a song so egregiously mid-1990s-college-radio that I will be amazed if anyone younger than 39 or older than 50 will even be able to hear it, let alone recognize it — to the filmic shout-outs to “Wild at Heart,” “Heat” and pretty much anything that Tarantino touched, “Baby Driver” is the most movie-made-by-a-guy-born-in-1974 you are likely to see in a good long time.
"Drive" is a main influence, concept-wise, with themes borrowed from "Wild At Heart," "Bonnie & Clyde" and "Thelma and Louise."
A Different Man (2024)
Directed by Aaron Schimberg
influenced by Eraserhead (1977), Lost Highway (1997)
Themes Visuals
Beyond subversive humor similarities, many other parallels can be formed between A Different Man and certain iconic projects from David Lynch's dreamlike oeuvre, from the duality themes of Lost Highway and Twin Peaks to the outsider vibes of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man and beyond. I have no clue if that was intentional or not, but as a huge Lynch fan, I found it only added to my enjoyment and anticipation for each absurd moment in Edward's story.
The gonzo absurdity of this sequence calls to mind the mad denouement of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) as well as images in David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) and Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (1976).
Beyond subversive humor similarities, many other parallels can be formed between A Different Man and certain iconic projects from David Lynch's dreamlike oeuvre, from the duality themes of Lost Highway and Twin Peaks to the outsider vibes of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man and beyond.
He throws in elements of David Cronenbergs The Fly, too, but ultimately Splice owes as much to David Lynchs parenthood-inspired Eraserhead as any other film.
Aside from Species, its near-anagram antecedent, there's a touch of David Lynch in Dren's bawling-Eraserhead-baby phase, while the ambiguous glass-box corporate parks and squishy horror are very early Cronenberg.
Elsa inserts some of her own DNA into the hybrid animal/monster they've created--think "Eraserhead."
The uncanny strangeness of the infant Dren also strongly recalls the nightmarish ‘baby’ in David Lynch’s Eraserhead.
Persona (1966)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
influenced Mulholland Drive (2001), Lost Highway (1997)
Themes Visuals Plot
I was reminded repeatedly of Ingmar Bergman's Persona , which also examines at close range the relationship between two women, one of them an actress, and which is also awash in reflexive elements that turn its status as cinema back on itself.
Club Silencio leads directly into the latter; the former is shortly preceded by a moment in which Rita's panic causes the film image to double and overlap itself, a rupture of reality as intense as any in the 35 years separating Mulholland Dr. from Ingmar Bergman's Persona .
Rita loses hope, sports a blond wig and Mulholland Drive's women suddenly become one (Persona anyone?).
David Lynch's Mulholland Drive contends that the answer to the eternal struggle between what is real and what is fantasy comes in the form of a Keatsian confusion--it's the difference between Adam's dream and Eve rendered flesh, blurred in the mind of the creator and his audience.A film is a dream of the director made tangible, a conceit familiar from the fourth wall-breaking in Ingmar Bergman's Persona (banishing any mystery there might have been regarding the visual references to that film in Lynch's piece), and a movie's characters therefore become projections of its maker's sublimated longing (clarifying too the auteur's use of wardrobe and colour schemes from Hitchcock's meditation on objectification, Vertigo, as well as those of his first collaboration with inamorata Tippi Hedren, The Birds).
The chief inspiration seems to have been such psychologically based films as Ingmar Bergman's Persona, in which main characters exchange personalities and identities in ways that are difficult to understand.
The insane, unholy marriage of "Lost Highway," "Jules and Jim," and his own "Audition," claws its way into the droning odyssey and climaxes in a scene of rebirth that would make David Lynch's head spin.
It helps to be tolerant of excess as the auteur does a pretty fair job at creating a Japanese David Lynch movie, borrowing liberally from the American maestro’s works, “U-Turn” and “Lost Highway.”
Partly inspired by Lynch's "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive," "Gozu" trades Lynch's nightmare logic for exasperating incoherence.
Having captured the strange suburbia within Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Elmes assists in highlighting the poetic beauty Paterson from Paterson sees within his hometown, which permits Paterson to soak up inspiration from the town and its people for his own poetry.
Frederick Elmes, who previously shot things as stylistically varied as Blue Velvet and The Ice Storm, sticks to muted, warmer tones, recalling faded family snapshots from the 1970s.
The stunning camerawork and expressive lighting by Frederick Elmes (Blue Velvet; River’s Edge; Synecdoche, New York) add further dimensions to Jarmusch’s storytelling, and the original music written and performed by Carter Logan, Sqürl, and Jarmusch lend Paterson a noodling quality that provides an aural equivalent to the reworking of lines of verse.
Lensed with a painter's eye by the great Frederick Elmes ("Blue Velvet"), the movie conveys an aura of Blakean mysticism through such homely sources as an 8-by-10 mugshot of Lou Costello; the connections to previous Jarmusch releases — Masatoshi Nagase, the Carl Perkins fan of the made-in-Memphis "Mystery Train," returns as a tourist — posit the film as the latest chapter in a bemused serial epic that is Knausgårdian in its appreciation of life's epiphanies and humiliations.
The cinematography by Frederic Elmes, who started out doing “Eraserhead” with David Lynch and has partnered with Jarmusch on several projects, captures the town in somber, reflective ways that mirror Paterson’s words and Williams’ observations.
The Babadook (2014)
Directed by Jennifer Kent
influenced by The Grandmother (1970), Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986)
Visuals Themes
The film is reminiscent of the 30-minute short film The Grandmother by David Lynch, whom Kent has cited as an influence (the auteur's has a singular approach to horror ).
"The Babadook" borrows heavily from early David Lynch, not just his award-winning short "The Grandmother" but his classic "Eraserhead," an extended nightmare that often plays out on a literal stage (the same happens more than once in "The Babadook").
Jennifer Kent’s excellent Australian film wades its way through paedophobic territory similar to that covered by David Lynch’s Eraserhead and Jaume Collet-Serra’s undervalued Orphan.
"The Babadook" borrows heavily from early David Lynch, not just his award-winning short "The Grandmother" but his classic "Eraserhead," an extended nightmare that often plays out on a literal stage (the same happens more than once in "The Babadook").
Later, there’s a shot near the end involving the family dog that’s a darkly comic riff on the opening scene of Blue Velvet .
Elsewhere his references skew higher-brow: When he positions Moore and Portman side-by-side in closeup, he evokes the dreamy surrealism of Ingmar Bergman's Persona and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, as if to suggest that Gracie's and Elizabeth's identities are blurring together.
May December is Haynes's entry in the “women swapping identities” subgenre (alongside Ingmar Bergman's Persona, Robert Altman's 3 Women, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, and so on), but it's a fully original one, with its own perspective on the ever-shifting power dynamics at its core.
The Neon Demon (2016)
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
influenced by Mulholland Drive (2001), Inland Empire (2006), Lost Highway (1997), Blue Velvet (1986), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)
Visuals Plot
While Refn crafts occasionally crisp and dazzling images, he can’t compare to the work of David Lynch in “Mulholland Drive,” imbuing them with a voluptuous peculiarity that truly unsettles.
Much of the film is as potent an elixir as the “Drive” auteur has mixed to date, marrying sensual visuals to a dreamlike Tinseltown yarn (the film borrows heavily from David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”).
Nicolas Winding Refn's new film is as if "2000 Maniacs" moved to "Mulholland Drive," took some acid, and decided to completely reboot "Suspiria."
Con la influencia del estilo visual expresionista de Dario Argento en Suspiria (1977); los guiños a las atmósferas surrealistas y enigmáticas de David Lynch en Mulholland Drive (2001) e Inland Empire (2006); y las referencias al body-horror temprano de David Cronenberg en Rabid (1977) y The Brood (1979), Nicolas Winding Refn (NWR, como una marca de alta costura) configura un thriller de horror a partir de una premisa bastante clara: el mundo de la moda funciona como un mecanismo perfecto que se devora a sí mismo para renovarse y continuar; es un proceso de regeneración cíclica.
The film offers a similar story to that told in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and David Cronenberg’s Maps To The Stars.
As well as skimming off Argento, Mario Bava and Walerian Borowczyk, it’s a film that seemingly teems with a vast array of influences — Cat People, Heathers, Black Swan and Mulholland Drive come to mind— yet still feels like it it can only come from Refn.
Backrooms (2026)
Directed by Kane Parsons
influenced by Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986)
Visuals
I’m thinking of the dream logic of David Lynch with “Eraserhead” and Charlie Kaufman with “Synecdoche, New York.”
It’s like The Twilight Zone meets The Shining meets Blue Velvet meets Twin Peaks meets Severance meets Blair Witch Project meets The Silence of the Lambs…
Backrooms is one of the most out there art-horror features since Eraserhead.
Backrooms brought me back to the first floor of the Carmel Clay Public Library, where I met this site’s co-founder and my lifelong friend, Evan Dossey, nearly 20 years ago. I was holding a DVD copy of Eraserhead when I looked up to find Evan’s eyes sparkling as they peered through the stacks. “That’s a great movie,” he said with anticipation, as if eagerly waiting to watch me enter another dimension.