Filmmaker David Lynch, director of Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet, dead at 78

David Lynch, the American filmmaker, writer and artist who scored best director Oscar nominations for Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man and Mulholland Drive and co-created the groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks, has died at age 78, his family said on Thursday.

"There's a big hole in the world now that he's no longer with us," reads a family statement posted on Lynch's Facebook page. "But, as he would say, 'Keep your eye on the doughnut and not on the hole.' It's a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way."

Last summer, Lynch had revealed to Sight and Sound that he was diagnosed with emphysema and would not be leaving his home because of fears of contracting the coronavirus or "even a cold."

"I've gotten emphysema from smoking for so long and so I'm homebound whether I like it or not," Lynch said, adding he didn't expect to make another film.

Originally a painter who broke through in the 1970s with the esoteric film Eraserhead, Lynch preferred not to explain his complex, bewildering films, which included Wild at Heart — the Palme d'Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990 — and the 1997 mystery Lost Highway.

"A film or a painting, each thing is its own sort of language, and it's not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there," he told the Guardian newspaper in a 2018 interview.

His style of filmmaking inspired the term "Lynchian," which Vanity Fair magazine described as weird, creepy and slow. In his films, Lynch inserted the macabre and disturbing into the ordinary and mundane, and heightened the impact with music.

Lynch said that he was not only interested in the story, but also the mood of a film, set by the visual elements and sound working together.

"I get ideas and I go with those ideas. It's not that I set out to disturb someone or do something to an audience — I set out to try to translate these ideas into film, and to create some sort of a world for me that I can say: 'Yes, this is what was in my mind,' " he told CBC's Valerie Pringle in a 1986 interview. 

"A lot of it is like going into a dream."

Jason Gorber, editor-in-chief of online film magazine That Shelf, said Lynch's impact is easily observable today.

Horror and genre films increasingly make their way to mainstream audiences and awards shows; strange, surreal fare like The Substance can become household names now, he said, where in the past they would be relegated to fringe audiences. The change has gone so far that, in that film's case, its critical acclaim helped earn star Demi Moore her first ever major acting award despite having worked in the industry for decades. 

"If there's any major change that has taken place over the last several decades, it's that genre films have become the absolute talisman for the way that cinema can actually tell stories," Gorber said, giving large credit to the success of Lynch's surreal productions. 

"He very much shepherded multiple generations of filmmakers and film-goers to visit his world, his vision."