In 1977, David Lynch released his first film Eraserhead. Eraserhead is a surrealist nightmare that never lets its viewer breathe throughout the 89-minute runtime.
I think the first thing we need to look at is the constant and quite simply courageous nature of how Lynch uses sound throughout the film. The very first thing the viewers hear is what sounds like distant rumbles from a thunderstorm that are layered beneath a white and brown noise that is constant. This eerie texture makes for an incredibly engaging hook to the movie. The white and brown noise continues to an apex that becomes distorted which compliments the otherworldly visuals from the opening. The viewers will continue to hear this white noise basically throughout the film. This constant "static" noise is what makes the silent parts of the movie almost unbearable to sit through. This 180-degree turn from loud and annoying white noise to complete silence is largely what makes this a horror film.
The astute student will immediately question whether the sound in the film is diegetic or non-diegetic. Diegetic sound is sound that originates from inside of the movie and would be the music or sounds that the actual characters would hear. Non-diegetic sound, on the other hand, is sound that is outside of the world in which the film is taking place. For example, most movie scores like the famous "Duh Duh" of Jaws are non-diegetic cues because the characters can't actually hear this music, it is simply there to build tension for the audience. In this context, we can assume that most hard sound effects and foley are diegetic sounds because the characters are making those sounds (footsteps, talking, door squeaks, gunshots, etc.) But this is where Eraserhead is unlike most movies. In my opinion, the constant white noise that anchors the rest of the sound in the film is non-diegetic. I don't think the characters in Eraserhead can actually hear this white noise. There is a case to be made that some variations of this white noise can be heard by the characters when they are in the main setting of the story around all of the industrial plants, but this is more of an exception. Lynch and Alan Splet (co-sound designer of the film alongside Lynch) use this white noise in an abstract way that further pushes along the entire narrative of the film in which we don't actually know what is real and what isn't real.
Alan Splet (co-sound designer of Eraserhead) pictured above.
Lynch and Splet didn't just use non-diegetic sound in an abstract way. In the film, the main character and his wife have a "child", but not in the sense of a human-born species. The child is not human, so the sound that it makes is basically up to the director of the film, which in this case is also the sound designer. The sound of the child plays a huge narrative role in the film that is totally separate from any creative decisions that were later made in post-production. On the creative side, the child makes superhuman cries and screeches to the point that narratively, the wife leaves the child, and the dad later makes some let's say "poor" decisions.
Eraserhead is a prime example of when the director has control and cares about the sound design in their film. This is what makes Eraserhead stand above the rest of films with "great sound". Eraserhead doesn't have ultra-realistic sound, it has an ultra-unrealistic sound that ultimately makes viewers want to keep coming back to this surrealist, confusing, nightmarish film.
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