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It’s almost unfair that David Lynch could produce the scariest scene of at least the last 25 years, if not longer, in a movie that isn’t even a horror movie. Not entirely, at least. Mulholland Dr., David Lynch’s 2001 masterpiece, is a lot of things at once. It’s a noir mystery; it’s an arch comedy about actresses; it’s a surrealist look underneath the Hollywood myth; it’s a sexy forbidden romance. And for at least once scene at a diner in broad daylight, it’s a horror movie.
If you’re not familiar with the legend of Mulholland Dr., it began as a pilot script for ABC, roughly a decade after Lynch partnered with the network to make Twin Peaks happen. A 90-minute pilot was filmed, starring Laura Harring as Rita, the beautiful amnesiac fleeing a car crash on the titular road, and Naomi Watts as Betty, the aspiring actress who wants to help Rita solve the mystery of her identity. It’s Lynch, so of course the real and surreal intermingled freely. Ultimately, ABC didn’t like the pilot, and Lynch was left to re-fashion it as a feature film. A good thing, too, because it opened to raves at Cannes, won Lynch the Best Director prize there and an Oscar nomination later that year. It remains perhaps his best film.
Because it was originally a TV pilot, the resulting film still has characters, subplots, and scenes that suggest a greater world outside the margins of our story that never gets fully explored. All of those loose threads contribute to Mulholland Dr.‘s sense of paranoia and mystery, and some of those individual scenes stand as some of the film’s best.
One of those scenes is the Winkie’s diner scene. It features two characters we haven’t seen before, Dan and Herb. They won’t factor into the film beyond this scene. They’re seated at a booth, and Dan’s telling Herb about a nightmare he’s had which takes place at this very diner. He describes a feeling of all-encompassing dread and a man lurking behind the diner who’s the cause of it. When Herb accompanies Dan out back to investigate … I mean, just watch it.
Good luck sleeping ever again!
The diner scene wasn’t the first time Lynch was able to deliver horror-caliber scares in a movie that you wouldn’t categorize as horror. Just a few years before that, he delivered a scene in Lost Highway with Robert Blake as a bone-chillingly mysterious creature.
But that lurking dumpster creature in Mulholland Dr., the way the film conspires to place us inside Dan’s nightmare, Lynch’s ability to be heart-stoppingly frightening in broad daylight, it’s all the stuff of expert horror filmmaking. It’s tough to get that scene out of your head. It’s that man! Out of nowhere! Up until the moment you actually see him, you don’t really ever expect to see him, this figure of ultimate fright.
Happy Halloween! In the interest of celebrating this scene, please enjoy these gifs.
