A ROOM with no windows. The walls are covered in red drapes. The floor is a disorientating pattern of black and white zig-zags. There are two black chairs. There’s some jazz music playing in the background.

In one of the chairs sits a diminutive man. He gets up and starts dancing to the music, but the movement of his limbs looks wrong. Then he speaks and there’s something wrong with the way he talks too, like the words have been squeezed and stretched again. This does not feel right.

Someone else arrives in the room. A blonde woman. She looks straight ahead and speaks, and it’s the same as with the small man: the words are weird and distorted. She clicks her fingers. “I’ll see you again in 25 years,” she says.

You may recognise all this weirdness straight away as one of the last scenes of the American TV drama series Twin Peaks and now here we are: 25 years have passed (or just a bit over) and the prediction of the woman in the room, Laura Palmer, has come true. She will see us again because the series is back again for the first time since 1991.

If you watched Twin Peaks the first time around you’ll know what its return means. It means a comeback for FBI agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan, who in the original was sent to a town in the north-west of America to investigate a murder. It could also mean we find out more about the victim Laura, the woman whose ghostly presence we encounter in the red room. And then there are the many weird suspects: a woman who believes she can communicate with a log, a psychiatrist who is clearly in need of a psychiatrist of his own, and many others. There is something wrong with this town.

You may also remember the look and feel of the place, spirited up by the men who created the show: Mark Frost, who wrote Hill Street Blues, but above all David Lynch, the surrealist director responsible for the films Wild At Heart and Mulholland Drive. You can see and feel Lynch’s hand in the stylish, slow, and sleazy visuals, the atmosphere that reeks of sex, and a script that was built on non-sequiturs and surrealism. It should never have worked or been popular, especially in the early 1990s when the top-rated shows were Beverley Hills, 90210 and Murder, She Wrote. But it did.

What I want to do now is find out why it worked – and whether it can again. I haven’t been allowed to see the first episode of the new series which will be shown this Monday (the press agent tells me the man himself wants to maintain the mystery – “It’s all very David Lynch,” she says). However, I have watched the original series again, consulted some people who love it and know it, and explored some of the ideas about why Twin Peaks worked, why it became a cult and the kind of influence it left behind. And, after all that, I do have some theories. But here's a warning: there are lots of theories.

The first and most obvious dark appeal of the show was the central murder mystery and in particular the body of the beautiful woman, murdered and left wrapped in plastic. In fact, there was a Twin Peaks fanzine called Wrapped In Plastic and the image of the dead woman and her beautiful blue face constantly recurs in the series. You also wonder if this was the beginning of the persistent, some might say disturbing, some might say misogynistic trope that now dominates crime fiction on television: the body of the beautiful woman, abused and killed by a man, and dumped somewhere to form the scenery of the first episode. It started with Twin Peaks.

But there was more to it than that. Yes, there was a dead body and yes there was a detective, but Twin Peaks was not just a crime thriller. In fact, watching it again you’re struck by how many genres it inhabits, as well as how many it satirises and sends up: crime, horror, soap opera and comedy. At times, Kyle MacLachlan seems to be playing the whole thing like Leslie Neilsen in Naked Gun. Could Twin Peaks have been a comedy all along?

Maybe, but it could also be a horror because, from hooting owls to jump-cuts to flickering neon signs by the roadside, Twin Peaks steals all the traditions of horror movies too. One of the central stories of the series is also about possession: there is a long-haired demonic entity called Bob who possesses Laura’s father and then, in the last episode of the original run, Agent Cooper himself. If this is a crime thriller, it’s one that Wes Craven or John Carpenter would have made.

This horror vibe was clearly highly appealing to many of the teenage boys who loved Twin Peaks the first time around – boys like Brad Dukes, who has been obsessed with the show since the 1990s and is the author of the book Reflections, An Oral History Of Twin Peaks.

“The characters hooked me,” says Dukes. “I was so fascinated with Dale Cooper and The Log Lady. I was also terrified of Bob, and he might be the most fascinating character of all for me. I still think about that character and I hope he shows up again. Everything is secondary to me after the characters.”

There may be another reason teenage boys loved Twin Peaks though, which is the presence, as in horror movies, of beautiful, young and vulnerable women seemingly objectified by a camera that feels more male than female. One of the most famous scenes in Twin Peaks comes early on when the character of Audrey Horne, played by Sherilyn Fenn, dances slowly by herself in the Twin Peaks diner and the camera can barely drag itself away from her. In scenes like these, it feels like the whole of Twin Peaks is about sex. The town’s psychiatrist, Lawrence Jacoby, even says it out loud: “The problems of our entire society are of a sexual nature.”

But if Twin Peaks is misogynistic and a show for straight men – and it certainly feels that way sometimes – then that wouldn’t explain the huge and loyal following it had, and has, among young women. The series certainly wouldn’t pass the Bechdel test, which famously asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women talking to each other about anything other than a man, but it does feature just as many female characters as men. And take a look at the massive world of Twin Peaks fan fiction: much of it is written by women.

That could never be the whole story of the show’s success though – in fact, the high ratings for the first series of Twin Peaks in the US, the UK and around the world would suggest the show had appeal that went way beyond teenage girls or sexed-up boys. Perhaps it was the shock factor – the fact that, as the 1980s turned into the 1990s, viewers were suddenly shown something that was utterly different from everything else. And, for a while at least, it drew them in.

“The show came along at a time when people were ready for something more challenging,” says Brad Dukes. “A lot of formulas were burned out in TV, and like Nirvana in the music scene soon after, it came along and seemed to offer something that hadn't been put together like that before, and the mass audience ate it up. I can't say Twin Peaks "endured" – as an intense fan, I met next to no-one for the next 15 years that was still holding on to the show. It wasn't until the internet came along that I realised there were people as intense as I was.”

Dukes also believes the show’s eccentricity – the what-the-hell-is-going-on factor – helps explain, first, its success and then its demise. “I think that kind of ties back to my Nirvana comparison,” he says. “It was so off the wall, that people took notice. ABC was doing some cool stuff at the time with China Beach and Roseanne, and they had created a place where something like Twin Peaks could exist. You could say the show's eccentricities were equally successful and fatal.”

By “fatal”, Dukes means what happened to the second season of Twin Peaks. For a while, in 1990, it was the biggest show on television. Lynch was on the cover of Time magazine, the cast were on chat shows, people in the street who 10 years before had worn “Who shot JR?” T-shirts were now wearing “Who killed Laura Palmer?” T-shirts, and viewers got together to watch the show while eating Agent Cooper’s favourite comestibles: cherry pie and coffee.

But then the second season came along and the weirdness that had seemed an asset was suddenly a problem: viewing figures plummeted and the show was cancelled. As if to prove a point, or defy the audience even, Lynch wrote a finale that featured still more weirdness: the red room and Laura’s promise that she would be back in 25 years and Agent Cooper, cracked and mad and possessed – and ready to kill?

However, for the loyal fans, it felt like the show had been killed off before it had grown up, although it’s obvious now that its early demise also contributed to its cult status. It was the James Dean of TV shows – it died young before it fulfilled its full potential. It also started to produce children: shows like The Sopranos, Oz and The X-Files that were clearly influenced by Twin Peaks. And the fact that Lynch approached working on Twin Peaks in exactly the same way he would working on a movie certainly helped others to take television more seriously – it pointed the way to better TV.

By the mid to late 1990s, the internet had only exaggerated the effect and Twin Peaks became the most culty of cults, enduring with the fans whose love probably made the new series inevitable. Rumours about a comeback first began to emerge in 2013 and were confirmed in October 2014. Apparently, Lynch and Mark Frost met and talked it through and it started to work. “We started talking,” says Lynch, “and more things started coming out and then, at a certain point, enough came out that we started talking about doing it.”

And now it’s happening and, appropriately, we don’t know what’s going on. There has been a trailer for the new series but it featured only 12 words: “Try me”, “He’s coming, I have to get off the phone” and “Albert.” We also know that many of the original cast will be returning, including Kyle MacLachlan and Sherilyn Fenn, and that the drama is set in the present day. But beyond that: who knows?

Brad Dukes thinks the new series is unlikely to be concerned much with what happened in the original series. “My gut tells me that this is going to be its own thing, and not a slave to any story that came before it,” he says. “I still think they have a huge expectation to meet, but I don't think Lynch and Frost would bring Twin Peaks back without something really special and wild in mind.”

Other fans will feel the same and the new series also seems ideal for the decade of the box-set binge. There’s every chance as well that Twin Peaks will do even better this time around with audiences schooled in all the weird and wonderful shows of Netflix. It’s a comedy that is very, very serious. It’s real and heightened at the same time. It lies to you and yet, in the words of Sherilynn Fenn, it has a bottom of truth. And can you think of a better show for these unsettling times that Twin Peaks? Nothing makes sense in this town, but then nothing makes sense in the world either – 2017 is the perfect time for the return of Twin Peaks.

Twin Peaks is on Sky Atlantic tomorrow (May 22) at 2am and Tuesday (May 23) at 9pm. Reflections, An Oral History Of Twin Peaks by Brad Dukes is published by Short/Tall Press