The only film ever that gave me the screaming abdabs.
The two scenes that turned my stomach are mentioned above. The Cornish game hen that squirms on the plate when carved, and the unwrapping of the child to expose its innards. The whole thing could have been designed as an exercise in giving Kevin the willies and still making him feel squeamish to this day. It's the only film I ever had to walk out of through sheer horror and distaste. I saw it at a midnight screening held by the film club I'd joined in Norwich, forty-odd years ago. I've since watched it on DVD, but let me tell you a secret. If you've only seen the DVD, you have missed the whole point. The surreality cannot reach through anything smaller than a full-size cinema screen. i swear that something in the celluloid was imprinted by Lynch to ooze out of the cinema screen, and is lost in digital. And go alone, God forbid you should have another human whose landholding presence might encourage you to stay for the whole thing.
Perhaps there really is some component of the horror that is transmitted directly from film, and that somehow, the conversion to digital strips out that gut-churning feeling that almost caused me to vomit in the cinema. I wasn't alone; a few days later I ran into another member of the club, who told me that she left soon after I did, and for the same reason. David Lynch, we decided (over a beer) was a highly disturbed individual whose œuvre would be best left unwatched. This film was disturbing to me on so many levels, but the ones that have stuck with me were the body-horror aspects. The child is hideous at best, somewhere between E.T and H R Giger's Alien chestburster phase; when the protagonist Henry unwraps its swaddling, the exposure is truly revolting, and has haunted my nightmares ever since. I can't handle a chicken carcass or carve the bird since then. Neither can I change a nappy (diaper) since then because it triggers that scene and it gets me deep down in my own guts, to retching point. I dread unwrapping the diaper to find a writhing mass of rotting, inhuman viscera. It would not make me the supportive father of a newborn, let's leave it at that. sure, I'll change the baby, please stand by with a sick-bag and bowl of disinfectant because I'm going to puke on the baby, as if the poopy nappy weren't enough. You'll have a doubly-stinky baby and a temporarily disabled father on your hands because I will be in a corner dry-retching for quite a while.
So that's my review of this film. If you've not seen it, please do, I hate to suffer alone.
For In the Absence of Light, Darkness Prevails: The 2025 Halloween Horrorquest
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