Un Chien Andalou and the Movie That Still Haunts Cinema

If you have ever seen Un Chien andalou (1929), chances are you never truly forgot it. The images stick with you in a way few films do, lingering somewhere between memory and nightmare. And if you have never seen it, consider this your warning and your invitation: you are about to experience one of the strangest, boldest, and most darkly fascinating short films ever made.

I first encountered Un Chien andalou in college, during a humanities course focused on dreams in literature. At the time, I had no idea what I was walking into. Like many surrealist works, the film draws directly from the logic of dreams, where meaning is slippery, time collapses, and images arrive without explanation. The title itself translates to “An Andalusian dog,” which is amusing considering there is not a dog in sight. That small joke feels perfectly in tune with the film’s spirit.

The origin story of the movie is almost as surreal as the film itself. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí decided to collaborate after sharing their dreams with one another. Dalí mentioned dreaming about ants swarming in his hand. Buñuel countered with a far more infamous image: slicing open an eyeball. Those two moments became the backbone of the project. The script was written in just six days, with Buñuel later explaining that they deliberately rejected anything that felt logical, cultural, or educated. In other words, they wanted to bypass the rational mind entirely.

Buñuel cast Pierre Batcheff and Simone Mareuil as the Man and Woman, and even stepped in front of the camera himself for the razor scene. The whole production was funded with money from his mother, which somehow makes the film even more delightfully rebellious. What emerged was a 16-minute surrealist landmark that rewrote the rules of cinema, using shocking imagery and dream logic to explore subconscious desire, repression, and moral decay.

Looking back, I realize my teacher was a bit of a surreal character himself. He looked like he had wandered out of the late nineteenth century, complete with a massive Arthur Rimbaud poster looming over the walls of books. At the time, I thought the film was just weird for the sake of being weird. It took years before I truly began to appreciate what Buñuel and Dalí were doing. It still amazes me that a film nearly a century old can feel so alive, so unsettling, and so modern.

Un Chien andalou matters because it did something cinema had never done before. It became the definitive surrealist film, translating Freud’s theories of the subconscious into pure visual language. It rejected traditional storytelling in favor of jarring, irrational sequences designed to provoke and disturb. It tackled themes of repressed desire and social hypocrisy, while simultaneously inventing a new way of seeing. And its influence has been enormous, shaping experimental film, music videos, and directors like David Lynch, who built entire careers around that uneasy dream logic.

The impact was immediate and scandalous, and the infamous eyeball scene remains one of the most referenced moments in avant-garde and horror cinema. You can see its DNA everywhere, from Roman Polanski’s Repulsion with its nightmarish walls and grasping hands, to Hitchcock’s Spellbound, where Dalí designed a dream sequence that brought surrealism straight into Hollywood. Lynch’s Eraserhead and Blue Velvet feel like spiritual descendants of Buñuel’s willingness to embrace discomfort.

If you have ever watched The Silence of the Lambs, you have already encountered a sly cinematic echo of Un Chien andalou, whether you realized it or not. Both films use the death’s-head hawkmoth as a deeply unsettling symbol, linking transformation, desire, and death in ways that feel more dreamlike than logical. In Buñuel and Dalí’s 1929 surrealist short, the moth appears as a shock image, its skull-like marking acting as an omen of mortality and a visual shorthand for the unconscious mind’s darker impulses. It belongs to a world where Eros and Thanatos collide, where sexual desire brushes up against violence, repression, and the specter of murder. The image is not explained because it does not need to be. Its power lies in how it bypasses reason and goes straight for discomfort.

In The Silence of the Lambs, the same species of moth reappears in a far more literal but no less disturbing context. Buffalo Bill breeds death’s-head hawkmoths and places their cocoons in the throats of his victims, turning the insect into a symbol of grotesque metamorphosis. To him, the moth represents rebirth, a chrysalis state that mirrors his delusional desire to transform himself by creating a new identity from human skin. The skull marking on the moth ties it directly to death, while the film’s iconic poster adds another surreal layer by featuring a Dalí image of nude women arranged as a skull, quietly looping back to Un Chien andalou. In both films, the moth becomes the dark twin of the butterfly, a symbol of change steeped in decay, silence, and shadows, proving how surrealist imagery continues to haunt modern cinema.

Dalí’s relationship with film did not stop there. His collaborations form a fascinating arc that bridges avant-garde rebellion and mainstream entertainment. Un Chien andalou was surrealism as an assault on reason. Spellbound brought that visual language into a psychological thriller that used dream imagery to solve a mystery. And then there is Destino, his collaboration with Disney, a project that explored time and destiny through animation and was only completed decades later. Together, these works show how surrealism migrated from the margins into the cultural mainstream.

Dalí believed cinema was the perfect medium for his “paranoiac-critical” method because movement made dreams feel real. And that is ultimately why Un Chien andalou still relevant. It does not just tell you a story. It invades your imagination. It forces you to see the world through a surrealist eye. And once you have seen it, you never quite see movies the same way again.