Lynch’s films, in particular, are nearly every bit as powerful and disturbing if you close your eyes and just listen to them. Sure, the bizarrely deformed baby in Eraserhead (“Mother, they’re still not sure it is a baby!”) looks repulsive and vulnerable, but its incessant mewling is what truly shreds Henry Spencer’s nerves, and the audience’s. Even when Henry is just walking the streets of Philadelphia at the outset of the film, he’s doing so within an evocative aural landscape that mirrors the visual one. And then there’s the scene that most thoroughly creeps me out, in which Henry has dinner at his girlfriend’s house. In its broad strokes, this is essentially the same idea as Meet The Parents—awkward young dude does his best to make small talk, encounters darkly comic weirdness at every turn—but Lynch’s conception of “darkly comic weirdness” has its own flavor. And a uniquely discomfiting soundscape to match.

(via David Lynch shows how audio can be creepier than any image in Eraserhead | Film | Scenic Routes | The A.V. Club)