There’s been an outpouring of grief following the announcement of David Lynch’s death on Jan. 15 at the age of 78. Among the assorted tributes online were several posts from prominent developers from the gaming industry, including Remedy Entertainment’s Sam Lake, Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro, and Pacific Drive developer Ironwood Studios. A few of these aren’t that surprising; for many both in gaming and in the wider world of pop culture, Twin Peaks looms large as a cultural milestone and point of influence. The third season of the series, Twin Peaks: The Return, exposed a wider generation to Lynch’s world when it first premiered in 2017, drawing them into his unique universe across 18 staggering episodes of television.
Cataloging Twin Peaks’ influence alone on gaming would be daunting. Not only are there the obvious examples of the creepy Pacific Northwest setting of Alan Wake and the aggressively Twin Peaks-inspired premise of Deadly Premonition, there are several other games indebted to the dream logic of Lynch’s work, from well-known titles like The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening to more obscure Japanese games like 1998’s Mizzurna Falls and 1995’s D. But to boil Lynch down to Twin Peaks — as revelatory and important as that series is — misses quite a lot of his artistry. David Lynch was more than just “damn good cups of coffee” and girls wrapped in plastic: through canny, droning audio and menacing cinematography, he created worlds wholly unlike anything seen in reality, so totally his own that his name became synonymous for the dark surrealism of everyday life that so many other artists to this day have attempted to pull off.
Perhaps no other games have pulled off the tone of David Lynch’s work quite as successfully as the first three entries in the Silent Hill series. On the surface, of course, there’s the soundtrack: industrial clangs and whirrs, deep droning bass tones, the crackle of static and electricity from a radio. But the most Lynchian of all is the series’ defining concept of the Otherworld. There’s the depiction of dank, industrial environments, of course (likely inspired by Lynch’s feature debut Eraserhead), but more than that. It’s the idea of there being alternate realities or even alternate people.
Silent Hill 2 director Masashi Tsuboyama detailed how Lynch’s film Lost Highway inspired the creation of dual characters Mary and Maria. That film follows a man named Fred Madison, played by Bill Pullman, who kills his wife, only to suddenly become a completely different person, encountering a version of her that seems to be the complete opposite of the woman we saw in the beginning. If that sounds familiar, well, it should. Silent Hill 2’s protagonist James Sunderland essentially becomes two people over the course of the game: his guilt-ridden self, and the sexually violent punisher known as Pyramid Head. This doubling of narrative is also present most famously in Mulholland Drive, where Naomi Watts’ character’s Betty appears as both a naive ingénue at the start and as a worn down, tortured woman by the end, while the idea of mirrored characters is arguably present in Blue Velvet as well.
It’s not just these more explicit references that make Silent Hill so Lynchian, though. The first game especially has the same stilted quality to its dialogue that is present in Lynch’s films like Eraserhead and Lost Highway. Harry Mason often sounds like he’s wandering through a dream, unsure of how even to react to the strange events occurring in front of him. More than any other game series, Silent Hill especially is drenched in symbolism throughout its first few entries, whether it be the layered sexual references and female-coded monsters of Silent Hill 2 or the scary bits of blossoming womanhood present throughout Silent Hill 3. Throughout the Silent Hill series, The Otherworld is essentially built out of the psyche of a specific person within the world of each game, much like how Mulholland Drive or Lost Highway are built in part around the psyches of their characters, whether they be actively dreaming or simply attempting to ignore the darker parts of themselves.
And then there’s the town of it all. Twin Peaks may get all the attention for exposing the dark heart of suburbia, but Lynch arguably got there much earlier with Blue Velvet’s signature opening scene, in which a placid and idyllic small town first encounters a medical emergency — along with a distinctly phallic spray of water — as the camera dives beneath the soil to reveal the insects crawling amongst the rot. Even more than Silent Hill, Alan Wake is almost directly inspired by Lynch, with the second entry pushing the comparisons even further through direct structural similarities to The Return (and of course, the Pacific Northwest of it all). Alan Wake 2 co-writer and co-director Sam Lake isn’t content to just rip off the quirk and the location, however; the character Alan Wake himself gets what’s essentially a “tulpa” — an otherworldly doppelganger reminiscent of Dale Cooper’s in Twin Peaks: The Return — on top of the FBI coming to town and blending in, to various degrees.
But Alan Wake 2, much like Silent Hill, understands that the hallmark of Lynch’s work comes in its ability to suddenly shift tones from the goofy to the uncanny, whether it be the darkness that falls over the town, or the shifts the player causes that transform a benign hotel room into a bloody crime scene. Of course, there’s also the use of negative space and silence, lulling the player into a sense of unease, with the architecture of the false New York seen in Alan Wake 2’s Dark Place giving the feeling of a place one’s been before but isn’t quite right. More than anything, although Lynchian works often feature distinct blaring soundscapes, just as important are the things that aren’t there: an empty hallway; a camera panning over a spare room; the dark of the highway strip. In a David Lynch movie, the sound often blends into the background, becoming another part of a sense of unease you can’t shake.
This is something that games like Control or Gone Home understand intimately, even though they may not be horror, or even explicitly pulling from Lynch as clearly save a few references like the FBI or the Pacific Northwest. For the latter especially, there’s the stray sounds of static or thunder, the completely silent and empty house you wander through as you uncover the cracks within a seemingly “normal” American family, including the suggestion of sexual abuse. The former creates that unease through the use of darkness and lighting, often featuring deserted rooms with people hovering suspended in air. Even something like Limbo carries shades of Eraserhead, with its muted color scheme, eventually shifting to an industrial wasteland, and a story heavy in symbolism that refuses to give clean answers as to what you’re doing or why.
Video games owe a lot to the influence of David Lynch, whether it be something as simple as being able to perceive that which sight cannot see or a snakeskin jacket that symbolizes one’s individuality and belief in personal freedom. With an ever-increasing focus on more cinematic experiences and inspiration from film and TV, it’s possible we might even get a truly Lynchian game whether it be survival horror or something completely unexpected. Twin Peaks and The Return may have garnered more attention for obvious reasons (it wouldn’t be very fun to simulate the experience of a Victorian man with a severe facial deformity, and there isn’t yet an open-world tractor driving game à la The Straight Story) but Lynch’s aesthetic and thematic concerns nonetheless trickle down thanks to the indelible impact his work has left on the very genre of horror itself. That gum you like has always been in style, and as long these roads keeping looping forever, so too will the memory of David Lynch.
Twin Peaks is available to stream on Paramount Plus. Twin Peaks: The Return is available to stream on Showtime. Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Eraserhead are available to stream on Criterion Channel. Blue Velvet is available to stream on Max. The Straight Story is available to stream on Disney Plus.
