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David Lynch is widely regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, known for classics like Twin Peaks and The Elephant Man. The latter, in particular, remains one of the most poignant biopics ever made, telling the tragic tale of Joseph Merrick, the deformed Victorian-era artist known as "The Elephant Man." Now, Jack Huston, well-known for his acting roles in Boardwalk Empire and American Hustle, is set to helm the upcoming remake of David Lynch's 1980s biopic, honoring the legacy of the late filmmaker who passed away in January 2025.

Backed by Phoenix Pictures, the film will be titled Joseph Merrick, and Kate Cohen, David Dobkin, and Mike Medavoy will produce it. While many adaptations have explored Merrick's life, David Lynch's 1980 film, starring John Hurt, remains the best version yet, earning eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director.

The remake will shine a light on...

David Lynch will be remembered for a long list of contributions made to the art of film. His surreal style, often confusing narratives, strange humor, and overall cinematic voice are all trademarks that few directors can emulate into their own work. But, what must be noted about his style is that as offbeat as it is, rarely does it feel distant from human emotion. Lynch has taken on more conventional projects to prove this and the first, perhaps the most devastating example that fits into this sentiment is ‘The Elephant Man’ (1980), an introspective character study of the real life Joseph Merrick (renamed in the film to John Merrick) who lived with obscene facial deformatives. In light of his unfortunate passing, let’s revisit his masterpiece about the treatment of outcasts in 1800s England which maintains David Lynch’s etherial style while remaining a emotionally engaging experience bound to make the...

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I had a fever. I was not well and could not think straight, but, being an age less than 10, I wasn't frightened. I'd been sick before and gotten better. My parents were unconcerned, the family dog was on the opposite end of the living room couch and the television dial was switched to The Movie Channel. While my friends were stuck in an overheated classroom learning cursive writing by rote like a pack of healthy suckers, I was drifting in and out of consciousness as films happened on the cathode ray tube nestled into a carved-out wooden nook eight feet away from me. I don't remember if I had a sore throat or a persistent cough. I do remember that I was happy and hungry for sensation. This was my happy place.

At this age, I'd watched enough movies to...

Quick Links 'Eraserhead' (1977) and 'The Elephant Man' (1980) 'Dune' (1984) and 'Blue Velvet' (1986) 'Wild at Heart' (1990) and 'Lost Highway' (1997) 'The Straight Story' (1999), 'Mulholland Drive' (2001), and 'Inland Empire' (2006) 'Twin Peaks' (1990-1991), 'Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me' (1992), and 'Twin Peaks: The Return' (2017)

The distinguished American director David Lynch died yesterday after battling emphysema, a lung disease caused by smoking. Hollywood is mourning the passing of the visionary and iconic director and remembering his legacy in the film industry. His films received critical acclaim for their dark, surrealistic vision, revolutionizing American films and how future directors approach filmmaking. As one of the greatest directors in the American film industry, Lynch left behind an astonishing filmography that includes 10 feature films along with his iconic Twin Peaks television series. He ventured from big-scale cinema...

Quick Links What Is 'The Elephant Man' About? Lynch Deconstructed Disability Narratives With 'The Elephant Man' 'The Elephant Man' Is Pure David Lynch

One of the all-time greats has left us. David Lynch, a master of surrealist and abstract cinema, sadly passed away this week at the age of 78. To put it simply, he had a style all his own, defined by dream logic and a deft mix of psychological terror with dark humor, and he was arguably one of the only contemporary filmmakers who could genuinely be called a “visionary.” On top of directing some of the greatest movies of all time, namely Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr., he was also the genius behind Twin Peaks, one of the most influential TV shows in history.

Yet maybe Lynch’s most underrated work of all was one of his first and one of his most straightforward.

In 1828, a young man wandered the streets of Nuremberg, Germany. He was shoddily dressed, spoke very little, and only carried with him a handwritten note and prayer book. The person, later identified as Kaspar Hauser, attested to having spent his formative years locked in a dungeon and only being fed bread and water. One of many foundlings, or abandoned children, Hausers life has been one shrouded in mystery ever since and was brought to light in 1974 by director Werner Herzog in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

One of the main figures in the New German Cinema Movement alongside R.W. Fassbinder and Wim Wenders, Herzogs approach to directing has been one that challenges the medium and seeks out images that are beyond convention. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser embodies many of the traits that have been synonymous with Herzog throughout his career.

The documentary-like approach to narrative film, which he had...

The Oscars has added many different award categories across its history, with one being added after the success of a 1980s drama, The Elephant Man. The Academy Awards are easily the most prestigious awards in the movie industry, with the first ceremony taking place in 1929. Across the history of the Academy Awards, there have been many award categories that have been added and retired across the years; most recently the award for Best Sound Editing, which was retired in 2019.

In 2024, the Oscars announced the creation of a new awards category that will recognize a movie's casting decision. The first Academy Award for Best Achievement In Casting will be awarded at the 98th ceremony in 2025; this is the first new award category since the creation of the Best Feature Film category in 2001. Further new categories may be created in the future as seen in the movie industry's campaign for a Best Stunt Award.

This article contains brief mention of self-harm and suicide.

Storytelling is considered the most powerful way to convey specific events and emotions. In cinema, the story is written to be combined with all the other components of a movie to fully express the filmmakers' take on the story. Cinematography, sound, editing and other areas certainly have their role in evoking the emotion wanted. Still, people have the main emotional reactions and remember a particular movie because of its plot and dialogue.

Throughout the history of cinema, and across all genres, the writing of a compelling story with memorable quotes is what eternalized the most heartbreaking movies. In parallel, some lesser known films became widely considered some of the saddest of all time for the same reason. The most heartbreaking movie quotes of all time are not necessarily the most famous, but the ones that fully capture their movie's saddest point.

Imagine you’re George Lucas. Imagine that you’ve just watched a weird experimental, black-and-white movie called Eraserhead. It doesn’t make sense, but it perfectly captures the anxieties anyone faces right before becoming a parent. Also, there’s an unbelievable baby monster creature that looks unlike anything you’ve seen before.

Then imagine you watch another movie by the same director, called The Elephant Man. It’s still black and white and has its surrealistic touches, but it tells a deeply humanistic story about a man with debilitating physical deformities asserting his dignity.

What do you do next? If you’re the real Lucas, you say, “I want this guy to make Star Wars!”

As strange as it sounds, Lucas admired David Lynch so much that he tried to get the famously idiosyncratic filmmaker to direct the third entry in the Original Trilogy, Return of the Jedi.

Why George...

Anthony Hopkins, a renowned actor, has been married to Stella Arroyave since 2003, and she has been a supportive presence throughout his career. While Hopkins is known for his acclaimed roles, Arroyave has also made a mark in the industry, both as an actor and as a producer and director. Arroyave has worked on several projects, including starring in a film with Hopkins and directing a film called Elyse. She is currently working on a documentary about her husband's life.

Anthony Hopkins is an award-winning actor who is known worldwide for his decades of performances, but some may not know that his wife Stella Arroyave is a Hollywood talent in her own right, despite starting in the industry later in life. Arroyave and Hopkins have been married since 2003, and she has been a fixture in the latter half of his career. Hopkins began his acting in the English theater system in the 1960s.

David Lynch's 1977 debut feature "Eraserhead" is a dank, horrifying picture, replete with surrealist imagery and themes of urban blight, suicidal ideation, and parental resentment. There are dreams within dreams, and even pleasant things are craggy and ugly. It's a smoky, messy film full of squirting bodily fluids and clumps of earth. It's one of the best films of its decade.

His 1980 follow-up film, "The Elephant Man," appears on paper to be one of the least likely sophomore efforts imaginable. Produced by Mel Brooks, "The Elephant Man" was a biographical prestige picture about the real-life Joseph Merrick (named John in the film), a man afflicted with, some have conjectured, Proteus syndrome. Merrick had an enlarged head, an outside right arm, and loose, tumor-ridden skin. He was a performer in circus sideshows and was assumed to be mentally infirm by his cruel "handlers." An English doctor named Frederick Treves discovered Merrick,...

Anthony Hopkins made his film debut 1968’s “The Lion in Winter” and the 83-year-old actor has become a lion in winter. He’s received extraordinary reviews for his devastating and poignant performance as an elderly man descending into dementia in “The Father,” which opened in theaters on Feb. 26.

AARP Movie for Grownups’ Tim Appelo stated: “Anthony Hopkins scores the performance of a lifetime as a man afflicted with dementia in a film that takes you inside his disintegrating reality — and also inside the experience of his daughter Anne (“The Favourite” Oscar winner Olivia Colman), who looks after him and faces terrifying decisions about his treatment.” Hopkins has won the British Independent Film Award for Best Actor, is nominated for a Golden Globe, SAG Award and Critics Choice honor and is a strong contender for an Oscar nomination.

Of course, he’s no stranger to Oscar. Hopkins won his only Academy...

Why is it that, when a horror film achieves something special, both the critics and the public tend to elevate it above and beyond the ‘lowly’ horror genre? David Lynch’s most humane and sympathetic film still makes our heads spin, and this new 4K remaster renders Freddie Francis’s great cinematography at its best. Lynch extends and develops the visual nightmares of his experimental Eraserhead for this true-life classic. Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt, Anne Bancroft, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller and Freddie Jones all give indelible, emotionally-moving performances. How many horror pictures hold up hope for social decency and personal dignity?

The Elephant Man

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 1051

1980 / B&w / 2:35 widescreen / 123 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date September 29, 2020 / 39.95

Starring: Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt, Anne Bancroft, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Freddie Jones, Michael Elphick, Hannah Gordon, Helen Ryan, John Standing, Dexter Fletcher, Lesley Dunlop, Phoebe Nicholls, Lydia Lisle,...

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“Peachy Keen”

By Raymond Benson

David Lynch is one America’s national treasures as an artist. He is mostly known as a filmmaker, of course, but he is also a painter and sculptor, a musician, and an author. At the time of writing, Lynch is 74 years old. His filmmaking output has slowed down considerably and these days he concentrates mostly on the fine arts. Nevertheless, he is arguably the heir apparent to Luis Buñuel as the foremost surrealist of our time.

And to think… Lynch owes it all to Mel Brooks.

Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration. Lynch’s talent likely would have broken through the barriers of Hollywood for him to become David Lynch in perhaps other ways, but there is no question that Mel Brooks gave Lynch his first big break in cinema.

Lynch had made one feature film, Eraserhead (1977), a low-budget,...

So often the king of surrealism, The Elephant Man has always been one of David Lynch’s more restrained features. That’s not to say that there aren’t the usual flourishes. The opening splice of wild elephants and a terrified human face imparts the tone of what is to come. But above all, this is a deeply human film, one replete with intensely emotive moments. The profoundly beguiled look on the face of Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) the first time he sees the man captures both the fear and awe inspired by this entirely novel person.

The man, of course, was Joseph Merrick (though referred to as John), a Victorian who lived with severe deformities across his body. Brought to life by a melancholy John Hurt, there is a desperate sadness to the Elephant Man’s being.Though saved from the humiliation of a carnival and the constant abuse...

Four decades on, John Hurt’s performance gives this biopic a poignancy that marks it apart from the rest of director’s work

This beautiful, measured and rather atypical movie by David Lynch from 1980 is now on re-release, written for the screen by Lynch with Christopher De Vore and Eric Bergren. It tells the story of John Merrick, the “Elephant Man”, a Victorian-era person with disfigurements who was rescued from a cruel fairground show by the concerned physician Frederick Treves and established as a fashionable figure in London society, despite nagging fears that Merrick had simply become a grander and more acceptable form of freak attraction.

John Hurt, in complex and intricate prosthetics, plays Merrick with an unforgettably distinctive, gentle, quavering voice. Anthony Hopkins is Treves, the muscular Victorian man of science who rescues him; John Gielgud is the stern hospital chief Mr Carr-Gomm who becomes an advocate for Merrick,...

The celebration for David Lynch’s birthday is continuing all week long. Following the surprise release of his 17-minute short film What Did Jack Do?, one of his seminal classics has been restored.

His masterfully crafted adaptation of The Elephant Man is a more subdued outing from the idiosyncratic auteur than his usual catalog but is no less of a masterpiece than his other features. With the new restoration arriving in U.K. theaters this spring for its 40th anniversary, StudioCanal has unveiled the trailer and hopefully we’ll see the eight-time Academy Award nominee turn up in the U.S. before long.

The Elephant Man is a beautifully rendered spectacle based on the tragic true story of the Victorian Londoner Joseph Merrick (John Hurt), derisively called “The Elephant Man” on account of the protuberant tumors that cover his body. He’s taken under the wing of noted doctor Frederick Treves...

David Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980) and Inland Empire (2006) are showing July and August on Mubi in the United Kingdom.“I am convinced we are all voyeurs. It’s part of the detective thing. We want to know secrets and we want to know what goes on behind those windows.” —David Lynch, interviewed by Newsday, March 9, 1997Whether or not you feel comfortable attaching the word horror to the universe of David Lynch depends on your receptiveness to the sort of terror that springs from the uncanny, from the moment familiar objects and situations take on the sinister glow of foreign, threatening things. To defend Lynch’s horror credentials is to embark in an act of taxonomical defence. For a genre that’s often seen to meddle with and grow alongside the thriller, Lynch’s version further obfuscates the distinction, conjuring up a hybrid that sits in between the two. Horror,...

“Stranger Things” star Charlie Heaton will take the lead in the BBC’s new two-part drama “The Elephant Man,” the U.K. public broadcaster announced Wednesday. Heaton will star as Joseph Merrick, and the show will span two 90-minute episodes to air on flagship channel BBC One in 2019.

Piers Wenger, controller of BBC Drama, also announced a trio of new drama series from female writers. The new commissions see dramas for BBC One and BBC Two from BAFTA winners Nicole Taylor and Michaela Coel. Oscar-nominated Irish filmmaker Lenny Abrahamson will direct an adaptation of author Sally Rooney’s “Normal People.”

Taylor, who won a BAFTA this year for best miniseries with “Three Girls,” will write six-part thriller “The Nest” for BBC One. Exploring the consequences of a pact between a wealthy couple and a teenage girl that changes all of their lives forever, “The Nest” is produced by Studio Lambert.

Exclusive: Stranger Things breakout Charlie Heaton is to star as Joseph Merrick in new two-part BBC One drama The Elephant Man, I can reveal.

The 2×90 minute drama bio-pic, from The Missing and Requiem producer New Pictures, will chart Merrick’s extraordinary story from his working-class beginnings in Leicestershire, through the work-houses, music halls and freak shows that punctuated 19th Century culture to his time at the London Hospital and his friendship with Dr Frederick Treves.

Commissioned by Piers Wenger, Controller of BBC Drama, and Charlotte Moore, Director of BBC Content, and written by Neil McKay (Moorside), the series will be directed by Richard Laxton (Mum). Executive producers are Elaine Pyke and Charlie Pattinson for New Pictures and Tommy Bulfin for BBC. Producer is Tom Mullens (Poldark). all3media will handle international distribution and is associate producer.

The series will be filmed in Wales with transmission due next year with additional casting under way.

By the prickliness of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes...

Yup, it can only be Meglos, the talking cactus who wants to rule the world. Oh, you can imagine Christopher Hamilton Bidmead crying buckets into his state-of-the-art 1980 word processor at such a concept.

Meglos is an interesting one in that it feels somewhat out of place in a season that's full of sombre mumblings about entropy, decay and other cheery concepts. What's more interesting is that we're only at story number two in the season, and after the relatively heavy-going Leisure Hive, Meglos is comparatively upbeat in tone. Along with State Of Decay, Meglos is about the only story of the season which feels more like the Doctor Who of old. And while State could have passed for a Hinchcliffe story, Meglos feels a bit like a season 17 story but with classier production values. We have a more light-hearted Doctor,...

By the prickliness of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes...

Yup, it can only be Meglos, the talking cactus who wants to rule the world. Oh, you can imagine Christopher Hamilton Bidmead crying buckets into his state-of-the-art 1980 word processor at such a concept.

Meglos is an interesting one in that it feels somewhat out of place in a season that's full of sombre mumblings about entropy, decay and other cheery concepts. What's more interesting is that we're only at story number two in the season, and after the relatively heavy-going Leisure Hive, Meglos is comparatively upbeat in tone. Along with State Of Decay, Meglos is about the only story of the season which feels more like the Doctor Who of old. And while State could have passed for a Hinchcliffe story, Meglos feels a bit like a season 17 story but with classier production values. We have a more light-hearted Doctor,...

By the prickliness of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes...

Yup, it can only be Meglos, the talking cactus who wants to rule the world. Oh, you can imagine Christopher Hamilton Bidmead crying buckets into his state-of-the-art 1980 word processor at such a concept.

Meglos is an interesting one in that it feels somewhat out of place in a season that's full of sombre mumblings about entropy, decay and other cheery concepts. What's more interesting is that we're only at story number two in the season, and after the relatively heavy-going Leisure Hive, Meglos is comparatively upbeat in tone. Along with State Of Decay, Meglos is about the only story of the season which feels more like the Doctor Who of old. And while State could have passed for a Hinchcliffe story, Meglos feels a bit like a season 17 story but with classier production values. We have a more light-hearted Doctor,...

By the prickliness of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes...

Yup, it can only be Meglos, the talking cactus who wants to rule the world. Oh, you can imagine Christopher Hamilton Bidmead crying buckets into his state-of-the-art 1980 word processor at such a concept.

Meglos is an interesting one in that it feels somewhat out of place in a season that's full of sombre mumblings about entropy, decay and other cheery concepts. What's more interesting is that we're only at story number two in the season, and after the relatively heavy-going Leisure Hive, Meglos is comparatively upbeat in tone. Along with State Of Decay, Meglos is about the only story of the season which feels more like the Doctor Who of old. And while State could have passed for a Hinchcliffe story, Meglos feels a bit like a season 17 story but with classier production values. We have a more light-hearted Doctor,...

David Lynch's 1980 film of the Victorian sideshow act turned celebrity is faithful to its source material but fails to get to the heart of the real Joseph Merrick

Director: David Lynch

Entertainment grade: B

History grade: C+

Joseph Merrick was born in Leicester in 1862. From around the age of five, he began to develop a serious and progressive physical deformity. By the time he had reached manhood, he was appearing on the sideshow circuit as the Elephant Man.

Wildlife

The film opens with a screaming woman being terrorised by elephants. It looks like an art-house flourish, but it is part of the history. Merrick claimed that his mother, when pregnant, had been frightened by a rampaging elephant. Some biographers of Merrick have laughed gently at the idea that elephants rampaged around the East Midlands but, reportedly, one did escape from a circus in Leicester in 1862. So, while it's safe...