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Eraserhead

Henry Spencer's face appears superimposed over a planet in space. He opens his mouth and a spermatozoon -like creature emerges. A man inside the planet moves a set of levers, and the creature is flushed away.

In an industrial cityscape, Henry walks home with his groceries. He is stopped outside his apartment by a woman across the hall, who informs him that his girlfriend, Mary, has invited him to dinner with her family. Henry leaves his groceries in his apartment, which is filled with piles of dirt and dead plants. That night, Henry visits Mary's home, conversing awkwardly with her mother. At the dinner table, he is asked to carve a Cornish game hen; the bird moves and writhes on the plate and gushes blood when cut. After dinner, Henry is cornered by Mary's mother, who tries to kiss him. She tells him that Mary has had his child and that the two must wed. This causes Henry to have a nose bleed. However, Mary is not sure if what she bore is a child.

The couple moves into Henry's one-room apartment and begins caring for the child, a swaddled bundle with an inhuman face that resembles the spermatozoon creature seen earlier. The infant refuses all food and cries incessantly and intolerably. The sound drives Mary hysterical, and she leaves Henry and the child. Henry attempts to care for the child, and he learns that it struggles to breathe and has developed painful sores on its skin.

Henry begins experiencing visions, again seeing the man in the planet, as well as a lady who inhabits his radiator and stomps more of the sperm creatures. After a sexual encounter with the girl across the hall, he has another vision in which the lady in the radiator sings (" In Heaven "), and his head pops off his body while he is fidgeting, replaced by the baby's crying head. Henry's disembodied head falls from the sky, landing on a street and breaking open. A boy finds it and takes it to a pencil factory to be turned into erasers.

Awakened, Henry seeks out the girl across the hall, but finds her with another man. Crushed, Henry returns to his room. He takes a pair of scissors and for the first time removes the child's swaddling clothes. It is revealed that the child has no skin; the bandages held its internal organs together, which proceed to spill out after the bandages are cut. The child gasps in pain, and Henry stabs its organs with the scissors. The wounds gush a thick liquid, covering the child. The power in the room overloads, causing the lights to flicker; as they flick on and off the child grows to huge proportions. As the lights burn out completely, the child's head is replaced by the planet seen at the beginning. Henry appears amidst a billowing cloud of eraser shavings. The side of the planet bursts apart and the man inside struggles with his levers, which emit sparks. Henry is embraced warmly by the lady in the radiator in a white void.