How my scariest scene in Twin Peaks reminds me to let go

Since 16 January, when the sad news broke that David Lynch had died, I’ve rewatched the whole of Twin Peaks. Twice.

I won’t reveal how many times that makes it in total, for fear they’ll have me committed to the nerdy bin. Which sounds like a magical place, if I’m honest.

Twin Peaks has always been a cultural port of call for me, a timeless piece of entertainment whose frames have fizzled in my brain ever since I first saw them in the 90s. Like my esteemed colleague, it serves as a source of comfort. It’s also a constant spring of analysis – with interpretations varying from focuses on food, numerology, transcendentalism and Nietzschean readings – but also a bottomless well of unsettlement, which is catnip for a card-carrying horror hound.

There’s one scene that is particularly disquieting for me.

The moment takes place in the third (and final) season of Twin Peaks. Part 15, to be precise: “There’s Some Fear in Letting Go”, which originally aired on 20 August 2017.

My skin crawling sensation is triggered by the final minutes of the episode, which was already an emotional one, as viewers had already bid farewell to the Log Lady – who is hands down my favourite character in the whole show.

We enter the Roadhouse, a gathering place which, unlike the first two seasons, has now become a space that reflects a scarred community. We return to it at the end of most Twin Peaks: The Return episodes, usually with a musical act to send us off. That week, it was Brit/Kiwi band The Veils, performing their haunting, apocalyptic track ‘Axolotl’.

We see two men approaching a young woman, Ruby (played by Charlyne Yi), which viewers hadn’t met before.

Ruby says she’s waiting for someone, but the two heavyset men forcibly lift her out of her seat and wordlessly plunk her onto the floor.

She meekly sits there before starting to crawl on all fours into a sea of legs, with the crowd listening to the band, who sing: “An accidental amphibian / I’m growing giddy as a Gideon / Another head for the chopping board / Who needs The Devil when you’ve got The Lord?“

She grows progressively distraught and suddenly lets out a prolonged, uncontrollable scream.

As I write these words, my hair stands on end. And to this day, I’m not completely sure why.

There’s nothing particularly frightening about the scene per se, but it doesn’t stop me questioning why this moment stands out so much – especially since Lynch conceptualized far scarier evil in multiple ways in Twin Peaks. BOB crawling over the sofa towards the camera; Windom Earle and his Stygian smile; Evil Coop’s jet black eyes; the Trinity Nuclear Test hauntingly soundtracked to Krzysztof Penderecki’s ‘Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima’; the fecundation of a dark egg within the mushroom cloud of man’s folly, representing an evil straight from the oneiric recesses of what we never thought imaginable…

Regardless, my mind returns to the screams of a random secondary character who has only one scene, no backstory, and no significance in relation to the wider story. And maybe that’s the point.

Maybe it’s the unnecessary cruelness of the act which leads to a lonely scream, Ruby being the embodiment of all those pushed around by the world and who are ignored. Maybe it’s the banality of evil that sends shivers down my spine, leading to the profound fear that being alive but wilfully unseen is terrifying.

If Carmen Maria Machado is right when she writes “When you enter into horror, you’re entering into your own mind, your own anxiety, your own fear, your own darkest spaces”, then does it mean that the thing I’m most afraid of in this world is the mundanity of evil acts and the helplessness one feels when faced with daily horrors? It’s also possible that the Part 15 moment, while seemingly random, reflects not only my own insecurities but also the title of the episode, in that there’s also great fear in accepting that we all do our best but frequently stumble to the ground. Whether we do it to ourselves or others drag us down.

Or maybe it’s just because Ruby’s screaming was, on 20 August 2017, a wakeup call to the fact that there were only three episodes left until the final curtain call.

Related

To allow you to escape from this live self-therapy session, which probably feels like a hostage situation at this point, I’ll share the realisation that snapped me out of my cortical trip.

One thing that David Lynch did so well was to question what qualifies as horror. It’s such a multifaceted genre – which frequently leads me to affirm, with arrogant conviction, that of all the cinematic genres, it is the richest and the most exciting.

Lynch was not a gatekeeper. He was interested in the subconscious, the darkness that sits underneath the white picket fence, and in exploring the boundaries of horror, he expanded its reach.

Why this scene scares me more than any other in Twin Peaks feels irrelevant in a Lynchian world. The director never liked to discuss the meaning behind his work; he repeatedly said that it was better to leave it up to the audience and not guide them. As an artist, he fought against the tyranny of rationality and allowed for things to just be.

Dread-infused, comforting, bizarre, joyful – all usually in the oddest of places.

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“I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable.”

Lynch was right when he said those words, understanding that people desperately scramble to ascribe meaning to everything. Including his own work. Maybe part of the beauty and horror of it all is that a scene can be just a scene. Not all mysteries are meant to be solved, and not knowing is what makes them so special in the first place.

A character who appears in only one scene can be as intriguing as the other key players, her plight feeling just as important. The same goes for life outside of screens, as everyone we meet has a story we may never get to see. At best, we may only get a disconnected fraction.

I still don’t know why I’m scared by Ruby’s scene, but nor do I care to know. It’s enough to feel how the scene, for me, encompasses the genius of a filmmaker who could create the perfect alchemy of mood, sound and direction to construct something truly unique. Something unnerving that reminds me that obstinately searching for neat answers is madness in an untidy and peripatetic world.

There’s some fear in letting go. There’s also great power in doing so too.

‘A Gathering of the Angels’, the two-day festival celebrating the life and career of David Lynch, takes place at the Genesis Cinema in London, UK, on 27-28 September 2025.