“Industrial Light and Magic” takes on a whole other level of meaning in David Lynch’s 1977 debut feature. “Eraserhead” was ushered into an unsuspecting world during the same season as “Star Wars” and, in its infinitely perverse manner, was just as much a mythic fable destined to infiltrate pop culture and generate a cult audience of repeat viewers.

Part of the appeal was the film’s disturbing Freudian imagery and deadpan bleak mise-en-scène: It was like watching Todd Browning’s “Freaks” directed by Samuel Beckett, a bad acid trip hallucinated in shades of charcoal and luminous gray, scored to the hydraulic wheeze of steam issuing from a radiator (albeit one that houses a tiny stage and a matching, furry-faced chanteuse who pledges, “In heaven, everything is fine”). As the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in the 1983 history “Midnight Movies,” the film was several years in the making, shot off-and-on in a makeshift studio Mr. Lynch rigged behind the American Film Institute in Beverly Hills, where this refugee from the Philadelphia art scene had been sponsored after a pair of his short, surreal animated films had won prizes.

Though mysteriously conceived — Mr. Lynch, with characteristic discretion, called it only “a dream of dark and troubling things” — the project was rigorously executed. The sound design, by the late (and perfectly named) Alan Splet, conveys a kind of psychic tinnitus: a never-ending subliminal hum, a noise that has frequently recurred in Mr. Lynch’s subsequent films. Frederick Elmes’s cinematography limns what appears to be a post-nuclear landscape of fickle alternating currents and penumbral funk. “Early nothing” is how Bette Davis might have described it, but the stark, minimalist tableau was also grunge at its most sublime, a world viewed as if through a microscope, mounted on a drainpipe.

Three decades on, “Eraserhead” returns to the screen today in a new print, restored under Mr. Lynch’s supervision, at the IFC Center, which occupies the former site of the Waverly Theater. It was there that “Eraserhead” began its second Manhattan run in the summer of 1979, its seemingly inevitable march toward the cult-film pantheon guided by the savvy distributor Ben Barenholtz. It was not for nothing that the film snatched the freak-out throne from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” at my university’s late-night movie series that year; Mr. Lynch’s vision of ambient dread and biological horror went down better with our sophomore readings of Kafka and enthusiasm for the Sex Pistols. That premiere of “Eraserheard” made such an impression that the guys at the campus video club bootlegged it instantly and began showing a crummy Betamax copy at keggers. It was immediately telling that the film held the blurry, teenaged gaze of a beer-soaked audience more raptly than did a similarly exhibited copy of “Deep Throat.”

The weirdness has been familiarized by decades of seepage into the popular subconscious. Arriving almost simultaneously with punk rock and sharing many of that movement’s neo-Dada impulses and affinities for nausea-inducing extremes, this is a movie everyone wanted to claim as an influence. Wikipedia lists no fewer than 28 music acts that have referenced “Eraserhead” — and that neglects to include the Texas singer-songwriter Lyle Lovett, whose Brillo Pad coiffure mimics that of the film’s hero, as well as the Clash, who threatened in an ad-lib to their version of “I Fought the Law”: “My name is Eraserhead, and I can rub you out.”

Yet, for all that, the film has lost none of its uncanny, primal … ick. The action begins after an abstract introductory sequence presents the Man in the Planet (Lynch’s future brother-in-law, Jack Fisk, who was then married to Sissy Spacek), one of the director’s signal enigmas, who mechanically unleashes a spray of sperm-like electrons that summons the luckless Henry Spencer (the now-deceased Lynch stalwart Jack Nance) out of the nameless void. Henry, a naïf with crazy hair and the bumbling everyman gait of a silent-movie comedian, soon discovers that his girlfriend, Mary (Charlotte Stewart), has given birth, a horrifying fact revealed during a dysfunctional family dinner in which the main course — a platter of baked squabs — comes to life and begins gushing blood. In a patch of priceless dialogue, Mary protests: “Mom! They’re still not sure it’s a baby!”

Even today, no one is sure what Mr. Lynch actually used to craft the bawling “infant” that becomes the bane of Henry’s pending single-father existence. Critics have suggested this swaddling, uh, thing is a kissing cousin of the decaying rabbit that kept Catherine Denueve company in “Repulsion.” Or was it related to the dead cat Mr. Lynch once appropriated from a veterinarian? Whatever, it drives a domestic nightmare unimagined in the smart-aleck universe of “Knocked Up” or “Juno.” This feat of engineering, equal parts Jan Svankmajer, Joel-Peter Witkin, and neighborhood butcher display, is central to the film’s grotesque, car-wreck charisma. It’s a showstopper: the missing link between the sliced donkey eyeball in “Un Chien Andalou” and the singing, dancing excretion Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo, in “South Park.”

What sustains “Eraserhead” now, though, isn’t so much the cringe-inducing stuntwork or the life-in-hell absurdity, but — again — its creators’ incredible, obsessive dedication to painterly visual detail and avant-garage soundscaping. It is a movie in which to lose yourself, an alien transmission from a galaxy far, far away … and as close as your radiator.

Through December 20 (323 Sixth Ave. at West 3rd Street, 212-924-7771).