Ending Explained: Eraserhead

💡 What does the ending really mean?

Henry, driven mad by the monstrous baby's ceaseless wailing, stabs it with scissors. Its body dissolves into a pool of viscous fluid while its head swells grotesquely to fill the screen. The planet explodes; Henry is sucked into the radiator, where the swollen-cheeked Lady in the Radiator embraces him in blinding white light. The film fades to pure white. Symbolically, the ending is a mutual abortion: Henry's infanticide is the desperate rejection of unwanted fatherhood, while his own dissolution becomes a final industrial-organic suicide. The radiator is the ultimate womb, reachable only by destroying what it produced. Creation and creator erase each other in a sterile, ecstatic return to nothing—the sole possible redemption.