Images of black and white to portray an eerie atmosphere. David lynch creates perplexingly ambiguous worlds and dreamlike situations which is the basis of many if not all of his works. It is certainly evident in films such as Eraserhead and the Elephant Man that this dreary and desolate setting is taken from such eras in cinematic history as German Expressionist cinema. Even though the Elephant man and Eraserhead would be catagorised as being visually inspired by German Expressionism, they hold their differences aesthetically. The Elephant man is quite tame in a Lynchian sense seeing that it 's so straightforward in it 's story telling and Eraserhead is more obscure and cryptic. In saying that they do bare some similarities, the obvious one being the contrast between light and dark, a noted characteristic of German Expressionist cinema. Another similarity being the images of an industrialised scenery, abundant with smog and dismal surroundings.

“Eraserhead 's unconventional plot, postindustrial wasteland setting and imagery which seems to have been extracted from the subconscious mind of a neurotic nebbish has drawn comparisons to the expressionist mise-en-scene of robert weine 's The Cabinate of Dr Caligari (1920) and the futuristic urban decay of Fritz Lang 's Metropolis (1927)”1.

With German expressionism, the dark and gothic mindset of the film-makers of the time was transferred onto the screen using some specially designed techniques. These include heavily contrasted