Even more than Blue Velvet, upon first viewing it in the ’80s on VHS, David Lynch’s non-narrative 1977 nightmare scratched an itch in my imagination. Here were my two favorite genres, horror and science fiction, spied through a murky crevice of the underground, a perv-o-licious perspective that forever altered my taste in movies. Out of similar fissures, the philosophic horror shows of David Cronenberg would strike deeper and sustain me longer, and I would come to find Lynch’s Hollywood Hallucination mode his richest (Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., Inland Empire). But Eraserhead came first, its swarming spermatozoa impregnating a love of the avant-garde that rapidly metastasized. Somewhat related: “Eraserhead’s not a movie I would drop acid for,” wrote J. Hoberman in ’77, “although I would consider it a revolutionary act if someone dropped a reel of it into the middle of Star Wars.” Was Tyler Durden reading? (NR) NATHAN LEE

Sat., Jan. 14, 9:30 p.m., 2012