David Lynch Directed The Single Greatest Jump Scare In Movie History

I was born into David Lynch’s world, and in some ways, I mean that literally. I was born and raised in Philadelphia, a metropolis where Lynch lived and worked and felt inspired by local artists and the city’s patina and grunge. While my mother was still recovering from my birth in the hospital, she watched the episode of “Twin Peaks” where — spoiler alert, I guess? — Leland Palmer (Ray Wise) stuffs the dead body of Maddy Ferguson (Sheryl Lee) into a golf bag, horrifying any nurses who walked into the room at inopportune moments. (DVRs and on-demand didn’t exist then, as she’s reminded me in the years since 1990; she had to watch it when it aired!) This is all to say that, over the past 30-odd years, I’ve grown up in a world where Lynch — a director and visionary who passed away on January 16, 2025 — has always been a part of the conversation.

This probably makes it all the more surprising that I didn’t watch “Mulholland Drive” for the first time until I was 30 years old, fulfilling a New Year’s resolution by pulling cards from a Cinephile deck and watching a movie with the actor on said card each week. For Naomi Watts, I went with “Mulholland Drive,” the movie on the card — and shortly after the movie started, I had to turn it off and come back to it two days later because the diner scene made me so viscerally upset that I needed a break. 

In case you’re unfamiliar, here’s the gist: Towards the beginning of “Mulholland Drive,” a man named Dan (Patrick Fischler) tells his dining companion that he’s been having upsetting dreams … specifically about a horrifying-looking person hiding behind Winkie’s Diner. Lo and behold, that exact horrifying-looking person is behind the diner at that very moment, at which point Dan collapses, and I almost did too. This is the best jump scare in cinematic history, and we can thank Lynch for making us all freak the f*** out over it. Now that Lynch is no longer with us, the world will be a little less weird going forward.

Nobody besides David Lynch knows the true significance of the humanesque creature lurking behind Winkie’s Diner — people have offered up interpretations over time, saying that it represents the dark subconscious of Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts) and her eventual undoing in the film — but actor Bonnie Aarons, who portrayed the weird mud-monster, told Vulture in 2014 that filming the scene was almost as trippy as watching it. Apparently, Aarons met Lynch at a party for “Twin Peaks” and her startlingly green eyes caught his attention — much like the time Frank Silva’s unsettling appearance led to Lynch casting the “Twin Peaks” prop master as the series’ Big Bad, “BOB” — at which point he asked Aarons to play the figure from Dan’s nightmares.

Asked whether or not she received any concrete information about her character, Aarons told interviewer Kenny Herzog that nobody told her very much before filming before slapping a bunch of real moss on her body (while, per Lynch’s instructions, making sure her eyes were clearly visible). Aarons also said that while she filmed the take used in the film, she was looking directly at Lynch himself, lending something particularly special to the scene … and revealed that she didn’t know quite how scary that moment would actually be. “When I saw the film with the cast and crew, I did scare myself, Aarons admitted. “The stories I’ve heard are so outrageous.”

So, did Lynch tell her what the character meant? No. “He says, ‘Not yet,'” Aarons told Herzog when asked whether or not Lynch ever revealed what he thought the character meant. “He says to me, ‘Everything.’ But he didn’t want to tell me.” Classic Lynch.

I’ll be honest. I find pretty much all of “Mulholland Drive” — a movie that a guy in one of my college film classes once called “Mulholland Doctor” after disastrously misreading the “Dr.” in the title — to be unsettling at best and terrifying at worst, which is precisely why I love it. The movie challenges me every time I steel myself to put it on again, and I know I’m not alone in that; give YouTube a cursory search and you’ll find a ton of lengthy, intense video essays breaking down various scenes, motifs, and meanings found within the film. (In regards to the Winkie’s scene, Spikima Movies has a particularly excellent breakdown on the platform.)

Just as a quick refresher, aside from Dan and his diner monster, “Mulholland Drive” focuses on a woman named Betty (Naomi Watts) who arrives in Los Angeles with big dreams of becoming an actor, only to encounter an amnesiac named Rita (Laura Harring) who recently survived a disastrous car accident on Los Angeles’ famous Mulholland Drive. The two women then experience a shift of identities partway through the movie when Watts’ Diane Selwyn wakes in the apartment she lived in “as Betty” — after opening a mysterious blue box — and meets “Rita” again as Camilla Rhodes, a rival actor, and by the time the two go to Club Silencio together, you’ll probably feel really confused (unless you were once somehow told, by David Lynch himself, what all of this truly means). That’s not a bad thing. Great art inspires questions and investigation, and “Mulholland Drive” is a masterpiece specifically because it’s weird, creepy, and unsettling. The world may have lost Lynch, but his work will live on — and freak people out — forever.

“Mulholland Drive” is available to rent or buy on major streaming platforms.