James Wan’s favourite David Lynch movie: “It’s his best film”
Along with his frequent writing partner Leigh Whannell, James Wan has become one of the masters of the modern horror movie. Beginning with his directorial debut, Saw, Wan crafted an entire terrifying universe that has become one of the highest-grossing horror franchises of all time, leading to future successful endeavours.
In 2010, the first Insidious movie arrived, and three years later, a sequel came alongside the first Conjuring film. These would also become widely successful horror series, and although Wan spread his creative wings with Furious 7 and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, it’s the realm of horror for which he will forever be known.
Naturally, Wan and Whannell’s movies are not everyone’s cup of tea, and even within the realms of the horror world, they might be perceived as being somewhat one-dimensional. The director and writer are no strangers to the realm of guilty pleasure, though, and in an interview with Film Comment, they named their top guilty pleasure choices.
After naming the likes of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Poltergeist, Jaws and The Crow, the pair turned their attention to David Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway, a work so unique that it seems to defy categorisation, although it has been frequently painted with the surrealist, neo-noir, psychological, horror and thriller tags.
“You might say that Lost Highway gets plenty of critical love, but I don’t think so,” said Whannell. “James and I believe it’s when Lynch really hit his stride. We bring this one up a lot as an example of a super-scary film, and we always get funny looks. We see it as one of the scariest horror films ever.”
The writer continued, “The slow-building dread, those strange videotapes arriving on the doorstep… No one can create dread like Lynch can. It’s Lynch’s version of a film about schizophrenia.” Indeed, there is a sense of dread that pervades most of David Lynch’s films, but it especially comes to a head in Lost Highway.
The film stars Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty and Robert Blake in his final film role. Pullman plays a musician who starts receiving strange videotapes of him and his wife (Arquette) in their home. The man is convicted of murder and is oddly replaced by a young man played by Getty after he mysteriously disappears.
“It’s his best film,” noted Wan. “The public seemed to like Mulholland Drive more, but Lost Highway hits all the notes we love. It has one of the creepiest scenes, when Bill Pullman is at the party and is approached by Robert Blake, who tells him: ‘I’m at your house right now.'”
Check out the trailer for David Lynch’s Lost Highway below.
