Most of us first became aware of David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer when she authored The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, a Twin Peaks tie-in book that could have been nothing more than a cheap gimmick. Instead, as Entertainment Weekly noted at the time, The Secret Diary is “gratifyingly faithful to the spirit of Peaks, and is therefore full of unorthodox sex, illegal drugs, casual blasphemy, and a generally negative attitude… Lynch has taken her father's conception of a good girl gone bad and run with it.” (Fewer Peaks fans remember the worthy follow-up, Scott Frost’s hilarious and astute The Autobiography of Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes; you can read it in its entirety here.)

So it wasn’t too surprising that Lynch the younger got her own director’s chair, nor was it a shock that the subject matter of her debut was a bit off the beaten path. As originally announced, Boxing Helena would star Kim Basinger as a woman who has both arms and legs amputated by an obsessed stalker. At some point Basinger decided that this perhaps was not the best direction for her career and dropped out of the project. (Lynch and her producers sued Basinger for breach of contract and were awarded over $8 million, although the verdict was later overturned.) The part of Helena was recast with Peaks beauty Sherilyn Fenn, and Julian Sands took on the role of the creepy suitor.

“I see it as a love story," said Lynch in 1992, "not a horror film. The image of Venus de Milo is so powerful. Obsessive love is like a series of amputations as you steal from one another. It's inviting, exciting, animalistic. I've been there; I've been drawn to it." But few others were drawn to Boxing Helena when it was released in 1993. “This film has all the psychological depth of a wading pool,” wrote Robert Faires in the Austin Chronicle. “Anything you've imagined without seeing the movie is likely more interesting than what's here.”

Most reviews were as bad or worse. As Lynch told the New York Times last year, the criticism stung. “I was so completely dumbfounded. Not that any creative medium isn’t important, but how was it possible for people to write that I didn’t deserve to be loved, or that I was a misogynist? It’s a movie, folks. It’s not like you walk into a museum and see a painter you don’t like and say: ‘You know what? That guy doesn’t deserve to be loved anymore. He’s a bad person.’ ”

Lynch endured some personal struggles as well, including recurring back pain from a long-ago traffic accident and struggles with the bottle. Now clean and sober, Lynch has returned to that director’s chair for the first time in 15 years with Surveillance, a serial killer thriller starring Bill Pullman (Lost Highway) and Julia Ormond (Inland Empire). It’s due later this year; take a look at the trailer, which features more than a trace of her father’s trademark imagery.