Eraserhead.

"Eraserhead was ushered into an unsuspecting world during the same season as Star Wars and, in its infinitely perverse manner, was just as much a mythic fable destined to infiltrate pop culture and generate a cult audience of repeat viewers," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "It was like watching Tod Browning's Freaks directed by Samuel Beckett, a bad acid trip hallucinated in shades of charcoal and luminous gray, scored to the hydraulic wheeze of steam issuing from a radiator (albeit one that houses a tiny stage and a matching, furry-faced chanteuse who pledges, 'In heaven, everything is fine')."

Updated.

"The film suggests various influences - its writhing bodies recall Francis Bacon's paintings, the baby's head evokes Georges Franju's lyrical slaughterhouse film Blood of the Beasts - traces of which continue to appear in Mr Lynch's films and fine-art works. The baby's head resembles that of a skinned lamb, and foreshadows the title character of The Elephant Man (1980) and the colossal worms of Dune (1984)," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, where she notes that a new 35mm print is screening at the IFC Center through December 20.

Related: "Published in 1983, Stuart Samuels's Midnight Movies was the first book to address a brief but notable moment in film culture: El Topo, Night of the Living Dead, Pink Flamingos, The Harder They Come, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Eraserhead were immensely popular in the 1970s, but only in the then-trendy witching hour slot," writes Ray Young at Flickhead. "Two decades later, the author revisits the phenomenon in Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream, a fast and engrossing documentary produced in 2005 for Starz that's now available on DVD."

Update: For Dennis Cozzalio, Eraserhead was not a midnight movie when he first saw it. Or rather, saw enough of it to decide to bail. He tells a fun story of surrender - and then, of catching up with it again years later, via Elephant Man, in a way. And he also sparks a string of comments on repertory fare in the late 70s and early 80s.

Posted by dwhudson at December 7, 2007 9:34 AM