Does David Lynch's eerie atmosphere (closer to german "Unheimlich"), have a definition and clear origin?

Question

One aspect that all of lynch's films have is that eerie feeling that something is not quite right, but I find that atmosphere to be different from pure surrealism. Did Lynch start this? Or does it have origins in earlier films? I think the best example of this style is his short series "Rabbits", but I haven't seen a similar tone in older movies and I have never seen a definition for this style.

Answer 1

Although the word "surrealist" is often misused -- to mean anything that is "weird" or slightly out of the ordinary -- I would argue that most of Lynch's movies fit the original definition of surrealism, as promulgated in Andre Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism. Precursors include Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or; Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon; and some dream sequences in Hitchcock's Spellbound.