Trailer
Plot summary
Henry Spencer carries his groceries home through a city of factories and constant noise, and leaves them in an apartment filled with dirt and dead plants. The woman across the hall stops him with an invitation: Mary X, his girlfriend, wants him at dinner with her family. That evening he sits with Mary's parents, awkward with her mother and asked to carve the Cornish game hen on the table, which writhes and bleeds when he cuts into it. After dinner her mother corners him, tries to kiss him and tells him that Mary has given birth to his child and that the two must marry, which brings on a nosebleed. Mary herself is not certain that what she bore is a child.
Cast
- Jean Langeas Grandmother
- Thomas Coulsonas The Boy
- John Monezas Bum
- T. Max Grahamas The Boss (as Neil Moran)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Eraserhead (1977)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Eraserhead spent years stuck in production because of chronic funding shortfalls; the shoot was kept alive by donations from David Lynch's friend Jack Fisk and Fisk's wife, actress Sissy Spacek, plus money from lead actor Jack Nance's wife, Catherine Coulson.
- The production ran so slowly that one scene showing Jack Nance's character opening a door and entering a room took a full year to shoot from start to finish, an extreme case of the shoot's years-long delays.
- David Lynch kept the method behind the deformed baby prop a total secret: he blindfolded the projectionist who handled the daily footage so the effect could not be revealed, and that projectionist has refused to describe it ever since.
- David Lynch's daughter Jennifer was born with severely clubbed feet requiring extensive corrective surgery, and Jennifer herself has said her unexpected conception and her own birth defects were the real basis for the film's themes about the fear of fatherhood.
- Stanley Kubrick told David Lynch that Eraserhead was his favorite film, and he later screened it for the cast and crew of The Shining to put them in the unsettling mindset he wanted for that production.
- Eraserhead opened to almost nobody: only 25 people showed up on its first night and 24 the next, before distributor Ben Barenholtz talked a New York theater into running it as a midnight movie, where it kept playing for a year.
