The Alphabet (1969)

The Worst Film Ever

A Masterpiece!

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

A gave this a ten out of ten because it's very good at what it is, a surrealist representation of a nightmare. Also this early animation stuff is very cool! There are so few of these early animations to go back and enjoy. I enjoy that it's a movie inspired by his wife's own nightmare. I talk in a sleep and I know I've said some creepy things! It's only four minutes so give it a watch!

Where can i start? I believe with the corrupt mind of this sleeping girl portioned out into a chaotic death at the end of the film. Wither the girl's nightmare came true or an utter deep symbolic meaning to this film really existed, i think that this short was overall a perfect solid eight. I can't put out a explanation to what this film really meant, but between the creepy child voices, the nightmarish voice- wind sounds, and the mumbling of the creepy girl is nothing more close to a nightmare. To put into words it made feel uncomfortable, in made me feel scared, and it made me feel completely blindsided, but hey it's just like David Lynch's " Absurd Encounter With Fear" from 1967. Both shorts are to the point, horrifying and utterly confusing.

If you missed your abc-education from the Sesame Street during your preschool-years no worries. David Lynch will teach you the basics in this less-than-4-minute short film. The frame to the story is an extremely pale, possible sick woman lying in bed right at the beginning and also at the end. We see a strange structure rising including the letters a to z and more and more growing as the alphabet proceeds. After a short cut to a pout with red lipstick we hear all the different ways in which the letter a can be shouted, some sounds downright creepy. Then we see an animated female figure having the letters put, literally put, into her head, which, not long after, explodes from the pressure. The blood is particularly memorable as the rest of the film is almost exclusively inconspicuous shades of gray. Then finally the cut back to Lynch's wife at this point who sings the alphabet song before she faces a similar fate like the previous girl, only she exhales the letters and the other had them inserted.This short-film is indeed very Lynch. If you like his abstract, surreal works, you'll probably have a good time watching, otherwise you'll wonder what in God's name is going on or even be downright appalled. You won't feel nothing though, that much is safe.

The second of David Lynch's films, The Alphabet, is a significant progression from his debut Six Men Getting Sick. Where the latter was a short piece of static animation, The Alphabet incorporates stop-motion and live action alongside the animated sequences. It's a much more interesting film that achieves an undoubted nightmarish mood.Its genesis was a story Lynch's wife Peggy told him. She had witnessed her young niece experience a nightmare. In a little bed in a darkened room her niece recounted the alphabet in her tormented sleep. From this story Lynch devised a short film that approximates the feeling of a nightmare, one specifically where the fear connected with learning is the source of the unease. There is an alphabet song the like of which would be sung in schools, but removed into this context seems very disturbing. This is probably the first example of Lynch taking a seemingly harmless everyday thing and making it sinister with well chosen associative images and sounds. Indeed this is also the first time that the director utilises sound to disquieting effect, something he would become a master of. Here, we have not only the alphabet song sung by Peggy but also distorted baby crying. The latter being a recording he made of his daughter Jennifer that was corrupted because the tape recorder was faulty. But it was a mistake that produced a result the director loved, and it is indeed a disturbing sound that accentuates the mood perfectly. The Alphabet works often on a subconscious level but it does have a central core idea derived from the alphabet dream that is visualised here. A girl with a white face in a bed in a darkened room experiences the terror of the dream and ends up hemorrhaging blood all over her white night gown and bed sheets. It's a disturbing image but it represents a reaction to the forced learning that initiated the dream in the first place.With this film Lynch moved forward in an important way. It's the first time where his dark sensibility was used in a way that approximated the mood of a nightmare.