There's Horror, and then there's David Lynch in anticlimatic

Good horror films usually target and accentuate certain primal fears, common to large demographics. Often multiple, layered into a tiramisu of finely honed terrors, set in its intention to raise our adrenaline and play a sort of sadomasochistic music on our instincts and feelings, though ultimately leveraging our reward sensors for a positive experience- not unlike the endorphin rush that follows an ice bath.

David Lynch is…different. Chaotic in a way that seems almost nonsensical on the screen (where Horror movies seem MORE sensical, somehow, in ‘movie world’), but on an emotional level something gets through that is dagger-to-the-heart real. It’s almost indescribable. He has you at all places. He has you in love, he has you in despair, he has you in comfort, and he has you in misery.

So when he goes dark, it’s not done so in a finely tuned way to play sadomasochistic music on our instincts. It’s like accidentally tearing the band-aid off of a rotten infected wound, as real as your worst memory, and being suddenly confronted with the horror of it. The way life can glide along like an afternoon dream of glades and butterflies, then suddenly turn black, and be mangled upon spikes. It hits too close to home.

Surrealism, like Van Gogh, always feels like the most honest medium of feeling.