Filmmaker David Lynch, who created surreal shows and films such as “Twin Peaks,” “Mulholland Drive” and “Blue Velvet,” has died. He was 78 years old.

“There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us,” Lynch’s family said in a statement. “But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.’”

The family didn’t disclose the cause of death. Lynch said in August he had emphysema from many years of smoking. He was otherwise in excellent shape, he said then. “I am filled with happiness,” he wrote, “and I will never retire.”

Lynch’s career has spanned film, music and art. His television and film work often examined the secrets, sometimes disturbing, of suburbia and small-town America. He often used sparse lighting to create ominous atmospheres in his work that he would punctuate with distorted images and unsettling ambient noises.

“People say my films are dark,” Lynch said in The Wall Street Journal in 2012. “But like lightness, darkness stems from a reflection of the world.”

Lynch has said he started out wanting to be a painter, studying art in Boston and Philadelphia in the 1960s. His shift into film came after a singular experience with a painting, he recalled in a 2015 interview , that led to him making several short films.

He was painting a garden, he said, colored mostly black with some green. “I was sitting looking at this painting and from the painting I heard a wind. And then I saw the green start to move. And I said, oh, a moving painting.”

He created several short films and years later, he went to study film in Los Angeles and developed “Eraserhead,” his first feature film, as a student project. Lynch helped finance the film by delivering The Wall Street Journal in Los Angeles, earning $50 a week.

“Eraserhead” was a surrealist horror film shot in black-and-white that came out in 1977. The film, starring Jack Nance, told a tale of a man raising a deformed child. It went on to become a cult hit.

He was nominated for an Academy Award for directing and adapting the screenplay for his next film, “The Elephant Man,” and later earned two more director nominations for “Blue Velvet,” which came out in 1986 and examined the dark side of American suburban life, and “Mulholland Drive,” from 2001.

“Mulholland Drive,” a neo-noir mystery set in Los Angeles, was Naomi Watts ’s breakthrough role and is considered among Lynch’s finest films, replete with fantasy sequences and a surrealistic feel.

Lynch’s adaptation of Frank Herbert ’s sci-fi novel “Dune,” starring frequent collaborator Kyle MacLachlan, was released in 1984. It bombed at the box office but developed a devoted following among die-hard Lynch fans.

“Twin Peaks,” which Lynch created with writer Mark Frost, made its debut in 1990 and ran for two seasons on ABC. It was a darkly funny and creepy tale of the murder of a high-school girl in a small town in Washington state and the FBI agent sent to investigate it, played by a young MacLachlan. A critical and ratings success, it became a cultural touchstone that, decades later, had Lynch directing and co-writing “Twin Peaks: The Return,” continuing the story.

Lynch made a cameo as legendary film director John Ford in Steven Spielberg ’s 2022 semiautobiographical film “The Fabelmans.”

The Academy gave him an honorary award in 2019 for “fearlessly breaking boundaries in pursuit of his singular cinematic vision.” He gave a brief thank-you speech that ended with him glancing down at his statuette and saying, “You have a very interesting face. Good night.”

Lynch’s other artistic interests included drawing and sculpture. He also released three studio albums of what he described as “modern blues.”

He was born in Missoula, Mont., on Jan. 20, 1946, but didn’t remain there long. His family moved frequently around the U.S. because of his father Donald Lynch ’s work for the Agriculture Department. He said his mother, Edwina “Sunny” Lynch and his father met at Duke University. He had a brother and a sister.

He said he had a childhood of elegant homes and tree-lined streets — “Middle America as it’s supposed to be”—but was often troubled by life’s darkness and fascinated by its contrasts.

“I saw life in extreme close-ups,” he said in “Lynch on Lynch,” a book of interviews with filmmaker Chris Rodley. “Saliva mixed with blood. Or long shots of a peaceful environment. I had lots of friends but I loved being alone and looking at insects swarming in the garden.”

He married and divorced several times and had four children.