film

In 1977, long before he became a household name, a 31-year-old David Lynch offered up this mind-boggling and totally unadorned tour of the more surreal recesses of his brain. Jack Nance plays a new dad floored with terror at every aspect of procreation, left to care for his deformed child in a bleak industrial landscape.

Produced with the help of the American Film Institute while Lynch was still studying there, Eraserhead emerged from its early obscurity to become a cult classic, a way for "weirdos" everywhere to identify each other through a single image (the famous shot of a dumbstruck Nance), and was finally selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". What set all that in motion was the gradual growth of its reputation as the perfect midnight movie in theatres, something Phenomena will give their audience the chance to experience for themselves with the 11.35pm start time of this screening.