The Alphabet

lynch has, with this short, somehow managed to recreate with disturbing accuracy the experience of any childhood nightmare. on watching you are instantly transported back to being 6 years old, wanting desperately to wake up and not being able to. you have to wonder at the fact that lynch has reproduced this experience to such effect that when it is finished you're left with that morning after feeling of relief that the dream is over, yet also that lingering discomfort as the memory gradually fades. to be able to recreate on film with such accuracy, the sub-conscious experience of people everywhere is an impressive achievement. i wish i could do it... disturbing yet brilliant.

One of the only pieces of Media that genuinely disturbs me.

Lynch's first film is a bizarre, revolting and terrifying account of a bedridden young girl apparently being tortured by the alphabet. The letters appear as weird, threatening shapes which (as in his follow-up The Grandmother) seem to take on plant form. The girl herself eventually vomits blood.

The film's meaning isn't clear, and is really of less important than the visuals, which are themselves like moving paintings. The innocence of the child's 'ABC' rhyming song is warped to give a frighteningly naive background to the horrific events.

Lynch's trademark is the expression of fear, and this short foregrounds that motif in the most disturbing way imaginable. Fans of this director should try and catch his debut, as it casts its shadow over much of his later work.

This was the first time David Lynch shot live-action footage. It isn't really a narrative film, like The Grandmother, but its more than a filmed moving painting like Six Men Getting Sick. It is mainly animation, truth be told, but it combines live action with it. This is what a child's nightmare looks like inside David Lynch's head - and let me tell you, its quite disturbing, on a par with Grandmother and Eraserhead.

Some of its images, like the girl bleeding from the mouth and reciting the alphabet - i can't get out of my head. I don't know if that's a good thing... Lynch is a very strange man, indeed. And what we get in his films isn't half the story, as members of his website will tell you. There are images there that you wouldn't even know to be wary of, to not think about - images you don't even know to protect yourself from. But as Elephant Man showed us, he is also a master director, who can control himself and a major production to perfection. As Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Dr showed us, Lynch's world can also be lots of fun. He's one of my favourite filmmakers because he gives me both fun AND haunting in the same frame - a feat not many can do.

VERY weird short by David Lynch. It's in black and white and shows a girl who looks like she's going completely mad while the letters of the alphabet go flying around her. She also sings that alphabet song.

I should have expected something weird from Lynch but this is even stranger than I thought it could be. In 4 short minutes he gives you a morbid and disturbing little story about the alphabet and terror. It doesn't make a bit of sense but the imagery is so strange and the sound so odd that you're pulled right in. Basically a short little horror film. You can see where "Eraserhead" came from. Worth seeing but only for those who don't scare easily. An 8.