David Lynch, the visionary filmmaker behind Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Twin Peaks — amongst many, many other highlights from a career that lasted almost six decades — has died aged 78, his family have announced. 

In a post on social media, Lynch’s family shared, “It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch. We would appreciate some privacy at this time. There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.’ It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.”

During a 2024 interview, Lynch revealed that he had been diagnosed with emphysema from a lifetime of cigarette smoking, and that the disease had essentially left him isolated at home. “I’m homebound whether I like it or not,” he said. “I can’t go out. And I can only walk a short distance before I’m out of oxygen.” According to Deadline, Lynch had been forced to evacuate from his home due to the LA fires, and that precipitated a downturn in his health.

Lynch made his first movie in 1967, with the animated Six Men Getting Sick (Sick Times); a student movie, which netted him a first place prize and led to a number of further shorts as he moved into live action. By the 1970s, he had moved to Los Angeles and started work on what would eventually become his debut feature film, Eraserhead. Filmed in bursts from 1972 through 1976, the movie was a personal project for the writer/director at a time that saw his personal life change significantly; he got divorced during production and lived briefly on the movie’s set. He also met his second wife through the production. Upon release, the movie — a surreal horror movie that draws on everything from Kafka to silent-era filmmaking, and is informed by Lynch’s own fears of being a father — confused critics, drawing as much condemnation as praise, although it has since become appreciated as a masterpiece and one of cinema’s most iconic first features from a director.

The movie drew the attention of a number of producers, leading to Lynch receiving offers to make everything from personal projects to the third Star Wars movie. (Yes, he really was offered the chance to direct what became Return of the Jedi; imagine that version of the film.) None other than Mel Brooks bankrolled his second film, The Elephant Man, before Lynch worked with infamous producer Dino de Laurentiis on the first movie adaptation of Dune. The box office failure of Dune proved to be a blessing in disguise, driving him back to more personal obsessions for the remainder of his career, starting with his next movie, 1986’s Blue Velvet.

Blue Velvet’s mix of sexual obsession, Americana, and the off-kilter would feed into the project that he’s arguably best known for: Twin Peaks, a series he co-created for ABC with writer/producer Mark Frost, and which ran initially for two years. To this day, it’s a surprise that Twin Peaks made it to air in the form it did, never mind temporarily becoming a phenomenon: it’s such a very strange show that mixes soap opera with something far stranger and darker, with an ending (to its initial broadcast run) that remains iconic and just a little disturbing 30+ years later.

With the arguable exception of Dune, one of the things that makes Lynch such an exceptional and memorable artist is that he never lost focus of his own obsessions and aesthetic — you can trace lines through everything from Eraserhead to his final work as a director, 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return (arguably his finest work as a filmmaker), up to and including Lost Highway, Inland Empire, or long-forgotten television shows like On the Air or Hotel Room (both born from the early success of Twin Peaks). Even his work as a cartoonist — someone, somewhere, needs to collect his 1990s newspaper strip The Angriest Dog in the World — or a musician are somehow immediately notable as being “Lynchian” in some indefinable, but recognizable, manner. 

What David Lynch brought to his work was at once a celebration of the weird and “not normal,” and a recognition that what passed for normal was, in its own way, weird and unusual. For all its purposeful embrace of the strange and unsettling, it was never judgmental nor off-putting for its own purposes, and Lynch’s public persona reflected that: up through the end, he remained an optimist who enjoyed his work and spoke excitedly and at length about it. There was, for want of a better term, something welcoming about the man and what he did, which made him unique in so many ways.

Lynch is survived by four children, including filmmaker daughter Jennifer.