The most disturbing movie I have ever seen, a ghost that haunted me since the night I saw it, was David Lynch’s The Elephant Man. Even writing about it won’t provide the mind-clearing catharsis that I so desperately need to erase the experience of seeing it as a young boy. In the 1980s, just before videotape rental houses proliferated, movies that you missed seeing in the theater would be re-broadcast on network TV—NBC, ABC or CBS. This is also how I first encountered paragons of cinema like the Sound of Music, the Wizard of Oz, and Police Academy. Here's a trailer for an ABC Sunday Night Movie featuring Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan (another movie that frightened me. Think: worms in ears).
One evening, my Dad, brother and I watched The Elephant Man, Lynch’s 1980 Oscar-nominated picture. Set in Victoria-era England, a surgeon rescues a man with hideous and debilitating tumors all over his body who last lived as life being paraded around “freak shows.”
Despite its deeper tale about inner beauty and sensitivity to be found in all of God’s creatures, the Academy Award-winning make-up job on John Hurt that transformed him into Merrick had me watching nearly the entire movie through my fingers. If ever there was a time when I wasn’t convinced by the line: “it’s only a movie,” it was then. Of course, Lynch ramped up the tension of not seeing the Elephant Man's full countenance for at least a half hour into the film. The reveal was appropriately devastating. As I would find out later, David Lynch has a way of keeping you off balance so that the "scary" moments are beyond effective.
Not that he intended this to be a scary film but he does want you to be horrified by the shear grotesqueness of TEM's physical features and he probably wasn't thinking what effect this might have on the psyche of an 9 or 10 year-old. Nothing since then has scared me more than those images; Lynch's Merrick was my evil clown, my monster under the bed. Midnight trips down the hall to the bathroom turned into terrorizing affairs and I imagined the Elephant Man behind me in his bulky, burlap mask, clawing at me with his [shudder] deformed hand. As an adult, it seems absurd to consider that the source of my primal fears were the sight of an historical figure. I guess there might be weirder ones out there.
My chief discovery from this experience was the wonders of David Lynch, whose work I would continue to get familiar with over the next years 25 years. He would become one of my favorite artists of all time. More to come…
Despite its deeper tale about inner beauty and sensitivity to be found in all of God’s creatures, the Academy Award-winning make-up job on John Hurt that transformed him into Merrick had me watching nearly the entire movie through my fingers. If ever there was a time when I wasn’t convinced by the line: “it’s only a movie,” it was then. Of course, Lynch ramped up the tension of not seeing the Elephant Man's full countenance for at least a half hour into the film. The reveal was appropriately devastating. As I would find out later, David Lynch has a way of keeping you off balance so that the "scary" moments are beyond effective.
Not that he intended this to be a scary film but he does want you to be horrified by the shear grotesqueness of TEM's physical features and he probably wasn't thinking what effect this might have on the psyche of an 9 or 10 year-old. Nothing since then has scared me more than those images; Lynch's Merrick was my evil clown, my monster under the bed. Midnight trips down the hall to the bathroom turned into terrorizing affairs and I imagined the Elephant Man behind me in his bulky, burlap mask, clawing at me with his [shudder] deformed hand. As an adult, it seems absurd to consider that the source of my primal fears were the sight of an historical figure. I guess there might be weirder ones out there.
My chief discovery from this experience was the wonders of David Lynch, whose work I would continue to get familiar with over the next years 25 years. He would become one of my favorite artists of all time. More to come…
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