What is it that makes Bob so scary in ‘Twin Peaks’?
In Twin Peaks, David Lynch had his ultimate villain clad in a denim jacket, which is to say, Bob should not be a scary as he is.
I could walk into any local music venue and find a Bob; long-haired, greasy, beady-eyed and likely even wearing that exact double denim look. There’s something about him that utterly goes against the grain of the typical bad guy. Usually, they tend to exist in the world of the suave, more clean-cut and uncanny. Or, they’re more outrightly horrific, showing visible signs of their violent nature. Bob is none of those things, yet since the show first premiered in 1990, and since he first appears as a shadowy figure in the pilot, he has prompted screams of pure terror from Sarah Palmer, the one he’s been haunting.
The unconventional nature of Bob comes down to pure chance, and perhaps one of the biggest veiled insults ever delivered in television history. The story goes that Frank Silva was literally just a set dresser working on that pilot episode when he was caught on camera by Lynch. Apparently, he simply found Silva so unsettling when he watched that accidental footage back that right there and then, he was cast as the embodiment of evil. Sure, Silva got a sweet promotion as he suddenly became the TV show’s main antagonist, but I’m not sure I’d ever quite recover from being told I look like a demonic force.
The moment utterly changed the course of the show. “In the beginning, there wasn’t any Bob,” Lynch said. But after discovering Silva and asking him to film that iconic Bob jumpscare at the bottom of Laura Palmer’s bed, he knew he needed a face to the evil that he was previously just going to keep as a kind of unknown, unembodied entity.
Imagine the scenes we would’ve missed out on, imagine the nightmare we would’ve been spared. Since watching the show, the images stick in my mind: Bob crawling across the living room, manically laughing, his and Leland Palmer’s faces merging and switching during an attack, or the final moments of season two as Agent Cooper desperately tries to navigate the Black Lodge while Bob and Windom Earle scream. There is just something about him. It is something so terrifying, far more terrifying than a man in a denim jacket should ever be.
“He is Bob, eager for fun. He wears a smile, everybody run”.
The attire was never addressed but we can muse that it all likely comes down to Lynch wanting Bob to be, at least to some degree, almost familiar. He isn’t supposed to be an unattainable evil, he’s supposed to be right around the corner in any small town, just as how Twin Peaks itself is supposed to be representative of any kind of small, rural town with its own dramas and darkness. In that way, he becomes all the more terrifying as we drop into these normal lives and watch them be harrowed.
“Drop in” is apt given that it’s the source to even more of Bob’s fright. Nothing in the world of Lynch is ever really explained, but Bob’s arrival into the lives of those he possesses certainly isn’t. “When Leland talks about knowing Bob as a child and says this was someone who invited me to play and I invited him in, there’s a certain classic type of vampire myth that comes into play when a soul that invites something into it to take part in its life cannot then refuse it anything,” Mark Frost said as his own theory, as if Bob is this thing vulnerable or lonely people invite in and then can’t shoo out.
It’s not like these people are offering their souls up to evil, he’s merely dropping in and taking them.
The fear is then added when it comes to what he does once he’s in. The devastating story of Laura Palmer, unveiled even more in Fire Walk With Me, feels like evil on a whole other level exactly because Bob doesn’t enact big, grand, paranormal and harrowingly violent attacks. Instead, his victims commit the worst acts humanity can.
“Maybe that’s all Bob is. The evil that men do. Maybe it doesn’t matter what we call it,” Albert concludes at the end of the deeply upsetting episode where the truth of Laura’s death is revealed and Leland Palmer is exorcised, coming to realise exactly what he’s done to his daughter. It’s gut-wrenching and terrifying, especially as Bob’s spirit merely leaves and escapes, going off to claim another victim as a statement that evil like that never actually ends.
We could get into all the paranormal stuff and all the theories about where Bob came from, but really, that’s the core. The terror lies in his familiarity, both in the unsettling look but also in his crimes. He’s haunted viewers ever since 1990 because there’s the sense that at any given moment, he could find you in your dreams or you could, without realising, invite a force like that in. But remember, just as he warned, “He is Bob, eager for fun. He wears a smile, everybody run”.
