From Star Wars to David Lynch: How my obsession with obscure 80s films rewired my tiny brain

Lost in the Garden, my surreal folk-horror novel, was heavily influenced by my love of underground arthouse cinema which first developed when I was a teenager – though, as I realised only recently, it wasn’t influenced in quite the way I’d always imagined. Growing up an orange-haired scamp in the wilds of rural 1980s Lincolnshire, there wasn’t much else to do than watch television and read books. Science fiction, cartoons and comedy shows on one hand; science fiction and fantasy on the other; and Jackanory, where they met in the middle.  

Films, though, didn’t interest me hugely. Yes, I’d enjoyed the big rompy blockbusters I saw at the local cinema: Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Superman II and III; and, like everyone my age, I was obsessed with Star Wars and knew the names of all the weird monsters and background characters. But they weren’t films, they were just themselves. Star Wars was Star Wars, it was its own unique thing that sometimes magically popped up on television around Christmas like a visit from Santa Claus. Actual films – the ones which mostly seemed to involve grown-ups discussing grown-up things – I mostly regarded as little more than slower, longer and more tedious TV programmes. Television is where I encountered them, after all, nestled between Blankety Blank and the Nine O’Clock News. 

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The outlier was 2001: A Space Odyssey. Eight-year-old Adam was utterly mesmerised by it. The jump cut to silently orbiting spacecraft, accompanied by The Blue Danube Waltz, was one of the most haunting things I’d ever seen; and that final 50 minutes completely rewired my tiny brain. That night I dreamed I was standing outside in the garden watching spaceships pass silently overhead. 

Some years later, in my teens, I borrowed a library book called Fantastic Cinema by Australian critic Peter Nicholls. It contained a piece about 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film I hadn’t seen since childhood, but about which I was still impossibly curious.

Over the course of 224 pages, the book outlined the history of sci-fi, supernatural horror and fantasy movies up until its publication in 1983. And the more I read, the more I became consumed by notions of underground, cult and arthouse cinema. I guzzled down Nicholls’ descriptions of Céline and Julie Go Boating, Eraserhead, Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend, Andrey Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stalker. I fell in love with all of them.

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I was so inspired by these films (which I’d largely yet to see… in the days before streaming and DVD releases, it could be prohibitively difficult to track down the more obscure end of cinema), that the initial kernels of Lost in the Garden started to form.

The tones and textures of what I imagined these films to be like fascinated me and fired my creativity: Céline and Julie Go Boating’s surreal diaphanous atmosphere (I’d already convinced myself it would be one of my favourite films); the quiet menace of Stalker’s rural environments; the bleak, queasy horror of Eraserhead. 

As it happened, Eraserhead turned up at my local cinema at some point during the 1990s: my entry into the weird and wild universe of David Lynch. I’d never seen a film before which so authentically evoked the feel of genuine nightmare: from the inky shadows of Henry’s apartment to its howling industrial soundscape to the eerily pootling Fats Waller organ music.

And yet there’s a strange warmth too: the claustrophobic rooms and looming shadows have a womblike quality; Henry himself, a denizen of this nightmare world, is polite, bashful and good-natured. In his book, Nicholls tells us that, “From behind a radiator a pallid chubby-cheeked vaudeville girl emerges to dance.”

I’d pictured a cadaverous Shirley Temple-type child dancing grotesquely in a chilly, grey-tiled bathroom, like something plucked from the depths a fever dream. In reality, the “chubby-cheeked girl” – an adult woman – is a much friendlier and more reassuring presence, despite her enormous prosthetic cheeks. The Eraserhead I was watching on the cinema screen, it turned out, was entirely different from the one I’d gleaned so vividly from the pages of Fantastic Cinema. 

As the years rolled by, I was able to catch up with more and more of these films. Céline and Julie G Boating did indeed become one of my very favourite films: beautiful, beguiling, indescribably magical… and absolutely nothing like what I’d imagined all those years before. Nor was Stalker, nor was
Weekend, nor was Dark Star. 

And it’s only recently that I realised Lost in the Garden isn’t inspired by those movies at all – it’s inspired by the ones I’d imagined. It’s inspired by what I felt and how I’d reacted when I first read about them. It’s the ghosts of the films which, in the pages of an obscure collection of essays from 1983, had first ignited my love of cinema.  

Lost in the Garden by Adam S Leslie is out now (Dead Ink Books, £10.99) and is the winner of the Nero Book Award for Fiction. The Nero Gold Prize for overall Book of the Year will be annouced on 5 March. You can buy a copy from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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