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The other day, in search of the perfect Christmas gift for my mother, I tried to buy David Lynch's Blue Velvet on DVD and discovered it was out of stock. Hurrying to another shop, and then another, I found that no one had it. And then, just as I was thinking that it's a strange kind of world where everyone decides to buy the same DVD on the same day, my Lynchian reverie was cut short by an e-mail from the Society of Film Distributors, informing me that Blue Velvet was about to be re-released in cinemas all over the country, just in time for Christmas.

It's 15 years since I first saw Blue Velvet, and I confess that I was nervous about watching it again, in the same way that you might be nervous about undergoing dental treatment or colonic irrigation. Back in 1986, I found the film so disturbing, so morbid and unhealthy, that I hardly wanted to repeat the experience. I knew that I had been affected, and deeply, by what I had seen through the louvred doors of my fingers, but until last week, when I saw it again, I think I had not appreciated just how important a film this was. Raging Bull may have been the best film of the Eighties; but Blue Velvet was surely the most influential.

There isn't the space to list all the names appearing on the Nineties cultural quilt that would show the stain of Blue Velvet's influence, so here are just five films to be getting on with: Seven, Pulp Fiction, River's Edge, Something Wild and LA Confidential. And because Lynch's influence shows no sign of waning (Happiness, State and Main), Columbia TriStar is surely justified in re-releasing what is arguably a modern masterpiece.

Blue Velvet is set in a Middle-American, small-town pleasantville where the sky is always a hyperrealistic shade of blue and where the picket fences are as white and as bright as the swords of the Lord's heavenly host. But descending beneath the grassy knoll of this American pastoral, Lynch's camera shows us the metaphor of the insect world -- a world where, in Tennyson's phrase, lurk "Dragons of the prime/That tare each other in their slime". Milton puts it better, I think: "Nature breeds,/Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,/Abominable, inutterable, and worse/Than fables yet have feigned..." Lynch seems to be saying to his audience that, at bug level, sure, things look bad -- but you will discover soon enough that, when it comes to low life, there's nothing to beat man himself.

One day, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) discovers a severed ear lying in a field. Jeffrey takes his grisly find to a local detective, whose daughter Sandy (Laura Dern) he much admires; indeed, this informs his choice of policeman. Like two characters in a Nancy Drew mystery, Jeffrey and Sandy are soon on the trail of our missing Van Gogh. Then Sandy tells Jeffrey about a local singer, Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), who lives in a sleazy apartment block close to where the ear was found, and whom her father suspects of being involved. Jeffrey resolves to break into Dorothy's apartment to see what he can find out.

"I don't know whether you're a detective or a pervert," Sandy tells Jeffrey. "That's forme to know and you to find out," he replies. As soon as he hides himself in Dorothy's closet and watches her undress, it's clear he's six of one and half a dozen of the other.

What follows, with the arrival in Dorothy's apartment of Frank Booth, is one of the most harrowing scenes in modern cinema; and playing Frank, as he uses and abuses Dorothy, Dennis Hopper gives the performance of his life. The nature of Frank's paraphilia is never quite made clear beyond his very obvious sadism and, probably, an impotence that manifests itself in the almost Tourette-like way he uses the word "fuck". Fuck is the one thing Frank can't do. He is a snarling casebook of Freudian sexual neuroses and hysterics, and the hellish depths of his sociopathic psyche would disturb Dr Hannibal Lecter. The touch of genius in Frank's character, as written by Lynch -- the one aspect that tips it right over the edge of the abyss--is his addiction to inhalants. Even as he uses Dorothy's blue velvet dressing gown as a fetish object of his onanism, Frank is also sniffing the contents of a plastic mask, much like the emphysemic Kenneth Tynan.

Originally, Lynch meant Frank's gas of choice to be helium, but Hopper-whose own knowledge of substance abuse is nothing short of pharmacopoeic--persuaded him that nitrous oxide would have given Frank a better high. That was a shame, because I have always felt that this is one area where the fiction might have been better than the fact: the idea of Frank performing his gross act of frottage with a squeaky helium voice is surely one of the great missed opportunities of modem cinema. Nevertheless, as memorable moments in cinema go, this one certainly puts the semen into seminal.

Lynch's film has inspired a great deal of loathing. One critic called it "phlegm noir". And the importance of the movie (no less obviously rebarbative now than 15 years ago -- once again, it has been given an 18 certificate) might still require stating.

Many films affect to be able to let us peek inside Pandora's box; few come close to the experience of watching Blue Velvet. Lynch shows us round a prelapsarian world of prom queens and apple-pie Sundays, and then hands us a ticket that takes us on a ten-cent tour of corruption and depravity. This is a rare thing. Most screen villains, Lecter included, are risible, comic-book creations; but no one could say this was true of Frank Booth. And Lynch's achievement lies in having created a film that captures something of the dark, elusive side of human nature, something abysmal anyway, and which puts one in mind of Baudelaire.

Shakespeare would have loved this film. Blue Velvet is nothing less than the cinematic proof of Hamlet's remark that "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Blue Velvet (18) is released at selected cinemas nationwide on 14 December