Director David Lynch, who radicalized American film with with a dark, surrealistic artistic vision in films like 'Blue Velvet,' has died. He was 78.

Lynch, who was born in Montana in 1946, was a writer, director and painter who studied at the American Film Institute. He first broke into the movie scene in 1977 when he turned his thesis project into his first feature film "Eraserhead," a black-and-white surrealist indie film that quickly gained notoriety as a midnight movie.