In: Peter Nicholls: The World of Fantastic Films. An illustrated survey. New York 1984.

The most extraordinary of these cheap, surrealist fantasies was David Lynch`s Eraserhead (1976). It tells the story of Henry, played with a wild-haired, staring-eyed, autistic quality by John Nance. He is inadequate, polite, withdrawn, almost wholly incapable of ordinary social contacts. He lives in a squalid bed-sitting room, and has a marginal relationship with a skinny, hysterical girl whose family, human rejects living in an urban wasteland, alternate between total passivity and a violent mania that borders on epilepsy. He is told he has fathered a child on this waif (Mother: "She`s having a baby." Daughter, distraut, "Mother, they`re not sure it`s a baby!"), and she moves in with him. The baby is a mutant, mewling horror - quite unnervingly convincing - that looks like a skinned rabbit. It is tightly wrapped, like a mummy, in swaddling clothes. The girl cannot tolerate the baby and leaves. Industrial noises permeate the room. The central images are of slime and ooze and small, wriggling things. Henry drifts through this nightmare trying to care for the child. From behind a radiator a pallid chubby-cheeked vaudeville girl emerges to dance, squashing foetus-like worms as she does so. Henry sleeps with the nymphomaniac across the hall, and the bed turns into a swamp. The baby comes out in horrible spots. Henry nurses it. Then, ultimately maddened, he begins to cut open its swaddling clothes with scissors. The bandages turn out to be part of its body, which bursts open revealing a mess of entrails that begin to foam and fill the room. A miniature apocalypse ensues, and a quiet man by a window (his face in the dim light looks horribly burned) again pulls the lever that he pulled at the beginning, and everything explodes. This man may be God.
The film is nauseating and compulsive. The industrial and human desolation that it evokes, and the disgust it shows for the body, for sex and procreation, is not for the squeamish. Yet all this is shown with a kind of pity, even a warped beauty. We cannot assume that the disgust shown in the film reflects any hatred of the body on Lynch`s part. One of the many points of this strange film may be political: That bodily disgust is in part born from human depriviation. The pessimism is not total. Henry is not a person without decency.