Eraserhead

David Lynch startled the world with Eraserhead.

A love story between a pencil factory worker and his girlfriend set in a dystopian industrial wasteland, this midnight classic is anything but a romance. Mutant babies, singing women who live inside radiators, dancing roasted chickens, and a perpetually confused-looking Jack Nance (Twin Peaks) as Henry Spencer. Influenced by the writings of Franz Kafka and Nikolai Gogol, Lynch's densely packed tale has to be experienced on the big screen to be fully understood.

Critics and filmmakers alike have canonized Eraserhead as a touchstone in film history, and both Stanley Kubrick and H.R. Giger have cited it as their favorite films (Kubrick screened it repeatedly during the shooting of The Shining to try to impart to his cast and crew the desired tone for his film). In 2004 it was added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.