David Lynch mesmerised filmgoers with mystery, beauty and horror

The first long, proper kiss David Lynch had with a girl took place in a ponderosa pine forest in America’s north-west. Pine needles, incredibly soft, covered the floor to a depth of about two feet. High treetops pierced the blue sky. The feel of the woods he knew as a boy stayed with him all his life: the smell of them, their dim lost interiors, the crispness of the air. “Twin Peaks”, the mysterious TV series that made him wildly famous in the early 1990s, opened with a shot of pines, mountains and mist. The mist too lingered, drifting in deep bass notes across the face of Laura Palmer, the high-school homecoming queen whose dead body, wrapped up in plastic, lay at the heart of the story. Beneath the surface ordinariness, violent disturbance was going on.