David Lynch followed the disaster of Dune with a $6m film he was left almost entirely alone to make, trading a pay cut for final cut. Kyle MacLachlan's amateur sleuth spies on Isabella Rossellini's abused nightclub singer and runs into Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth, and the American town around them turns out to hide as much as either of them.
David Lynch spent roughly five years shooting his AFI student project in disused stables and a soundproofed studio he built himself, financed along the way by donations from friends including Sissy Spacek. The result follows Henry Spencer, left to care for a grotesquely deformed baby in an industrial wasteland, shot in stark black and white with sound design as unsettling as anything on screen. It became a midnight-movie staple and launched Lynch's career from almost nothing.
David Lynch's first film after Twin Peaks follows Bill Pullman's jazz musician, arrested for a murder he cannot account for, who inexplicably becomes a different young man midway through. Written with novelist Barry Gifford and shot by Peter Deming in near-total darkness, it was a box-office failure on release that has since built a devoted following willing to sit with a story that refuses to resolve.