Eraserhead
★★★★Worth watchingIs Eraserhead worth watching? (No spoilers)
Impossible to fully explain, but it makes you feel hopeless, trapped and small in a way that's genuinely remarkable. It took me two days to decide, and I loved it. Go in expecting a nightmare, not a plot.
⚠️ Spoiler warning: everything below the quick take, including the full review and ending explained, contains spoilers.
Eraserhead review
Eraserhead may be the first picture I've seen that left me completely clueless in regards to my own opinion on it.
However, two days later I've decided I quite enjoyed it. A film that is impossible to fully explain, yet evokes emotions as you view it in a way that is truly remarkable. The feeling of hopelessness, being trapped, feeling small and powerless to change anything, is perfectly given to the viewer without ever needing an explanation.
I think the most confusing scene was what gave us the name of the film, our protagonist dying, being beheaded, then turned into pencil erasers. Yet somehow even that adds to the film in an inexplicable way.
Overall this was a great movie I certainly need to rewatch, and proves you don't need to understand every individual scene to understand what the story is trying to say.
Is Eraserhead scary?
Scare level: 3/5
It's not jump-scary, but it's deeply unsettling: industrial noise, grotesque imagery, and the 'baby,' one of the most disturbing things ever put on film. It's a feeling of creeping dread, not a fright fest.
Eraserhead ending explained
Henry, stuck in a bleak industrial city, has been left alone to care for his deformed, constantly crying 'baby' after his girlfriend Mary leaves. After being rejected by his neighbor and dreaming about his head being turned into pencil erasers, he cuts open the baby's bandages with scissors. Its organs spill out, it grows monstrously, and the lights in the room go haywire.
The Man in the Planet, who has been pulling levers since the opening, struggles with them as sparks fly. Then everything washes out to white, and Henry is embraced by the Lady in the Radiator, who earlier sang that 'in heaven, everything is fine.'
David Lynch never explained the film, but it's widely read as being about fear of fatherhood and responsibility. The ending can be read as Henry escaping that fear the only way he can: by killing the baby and either dying or fleeing into his fantasy of heaven.
My take: you don't need to understand every scene to understand what the film is saying.
Does Eraserhead have a post-credits scene?
No. Eraserhead has no mid-credits or post-credits scene.
Movies like Eraserhead
- Mulholland Drive (2001) ★★★★ – Lynch's dream logic, with a story you can piece together
- Possession (1981) ★ – surreal relationship horror with a creature at its center
- Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) – black-and-white industrial body horror
- Beau Is Afraid (2023) – a nightmare from the point of view of one anxious man