How the terrifying villain of ‘Twin Peaks’ was a complete accident
I can’t think of a moment in TV history that has scared me more than a relatively throwaway scene from the otherwise uneven second series of Twin Peaks.
Yes, even more so than The Gentlemen in ‘Hush’ from Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the car scene from The Haunting of Hill House, and the ending of Threads.
It’s the scene where Donna, James and Maddy sit in the Haywards’ living room recording a lovely little song together, before Maddy looks across the room and has a vision of a figure striding towards them. He grins demonically. He steps right over the couch in this beautifully set up suburban dream. Crawls over the coffee table. Maddy screams in terror, and I slept with the light on the night after I watched that episode. True story.
For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of watching David Lynch’s masterpiece, things are about to get a little complicated. The man in question is B.O.B, a demonic entity that’s arguably the villain of Twin Peaks. Most of the time, he possesses people to act out his sick lust for violence, but when he’s not taking control of innocent civilians, he looks like a man. A striking looking one with long silver-grey hair and ever-present double denim, but a man nonetheless.
Compared to the creations I was talking about earlier, he’s perfectly average. In fact, the man who plays him, Frank Silva, is very handsome with it. Yet somehow, through his petrifying rictus grin and Lynch’s masterful direction, he becomes one of the most terrifying creations in TV history. However, he was never meant to be there because Frank Silva wasn’t an actor. In fact, he was a prop master and set decorator who had worked with Lynch on films like Dune and Wild At Heart.
Silva came to become the embodiment of evil within the world of Twin Peaks in the most Lynchian fashion possible, by complete accident. During the making of the pilot episode, Lynch caught sight of Silva crouching next to a bed in the set for Laura Palmer’s bedroom. He was so struck by the image that he told Silva to stay right there and filmed a few seconds of footage, just in case he needed it. Lynch wouldn’t know what to do with that footage until much later.
When they were filming a pivotal scene of Laura Palmer’s mother, Lynch thought they’d got the perfect scene until his camera operator Sean Doyle pointed out that Silva was in the shot, reflected in the mirror. Suddenly, everything fell into place. Lynch knew that was the take to use, because it introduced the world to the villain of the whole piece.
Which is Lynch in a nutshell. By keeping his options open, listening to his gut and not trying to control everything on the fly, he turned a jobbing set decorator into one of the most petrifying figures in TV history. One whose appearance still sends a shiver down the spine over three decades on from his original appearance.