The 20 greatest psychedelic films of all time
“You live in the image you have of the world. Every one of us lives in a different world, with different space and different time.” – Alejandro Jodorowsky
Whilst the basis of western filmmaking is based on a rigid structure of narrative, including character stereotypes and practical cinematography, its origins lie in something far more experimental. Some of the earliest and most influential films of all time, including the likes of A Trip to the Moon from George Méliès and Metropolis by Fritz Lang, inspired tales of strange ethereal wonder that utilised a wide range of eclectic film styles and forms of expression.
Over a century later and cinema has enjoyed a vast increase in its amount of filmmaking devices, with the dawn of animatronics, green screen and the brand new StageCraft, allowing filmmakers to conjure new worlds previously restricted to the corners of a creatives’ own mind. Filmmakers such as David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Gaspar Noé are famous for toying with such experimentation, using the medium of film as a sandbox to design their own eccentric worlds.
Spanning multiple genres, cinematic styles and cultural influences, the most experimental films of all time offer a psychedelic delight of twisted colours, technical wizardry and mind-bending storytelling. These are the films that make us consider our reality from a new angle, from the wild animated worlds of René Laloux to Alejandro Jodorowsky landscapes of dreams, wonder and insanity.
The 20 best psychedelic films of all time:
20. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
A ballerina (Moira Shearer) is torn between her love of dance and her love for a composer (Marious Goring) in this British classic. With her instructor (Boris Lermontov) testing her commitment to her craft against her romance, the dilemma brings a heavy emotional burden.
The Red Shoes utilises a fantastical style in its infamous dance sequences to express meaning. Art director Hein Heckroth explained, “when the girl is dancing, she feels she is a bird, a flower, a cloud; when the spotlight hits her, she feels she is alone”.
19. Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)
A grieving young woman (Florence Pugh) travels to Sweden with her emotionally unavailable partner and some friends. They plan to study a summer festival celebrated by a cult, with nightmarish results.
Midsommar explores repressed grief in its psychedelic drug scenes, as Dani has a bad trip under mushrooms where she sees her deceased family. Her boyfriend also experiences bizarre events under the influence and manipulation of the cult, and the audience can only sit there and watch in shock.
18. Fehérlófia/Son of the White Mare (Marcell Jankovics, 1981)
A horse goddess gives birth to three powerful brothers. After growing up separately, they reunite to save three princesses from three evil dragons in the Underworld.
Surreal and trippy imagery communicates this film’s mythical tones, as the characters defy laws of physics through movement. The colour palette is strikingly vibrant and demonstrates the film’s stance as a powerhouse in animation.
17. Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000)
Three youths plan to get rich from selling drugs, but their own addictions pose problems. One of their mothers (Ellen Burstyn) finds her own dreams ruined by new substance abuse.
Requiem for a Dream‘s drug use sequences are experimental and abstract in visual composition, yet, the aftermath is tragically bitter. Images of dilated pupils and accelerating bloodstream are used alongside distorted sounds to exemplify the psychedelic influence, followed by sequences of ruined lives and broken emotional states.
16. Bliss (Joe Begos, 2019)
During a creativity block, a hard-partying artist indulges in a series of dangerous drug binges. These drugs come with a savage taste for blood.
Begos shows an electrifying world of madness. The surreal visuals and heavy metal soundtrack blend to amplify the senses, with the occasional buckets of gore to twist some stomachs. It’s just as bloody as it is psychedelic.
15. 夢’/Dreams (Akira Kurosawa, 1990)
Eight segments that depict dreams are presented in this magical realist film. These surreal stories include a sun shower, the Second World War, and a ‘weeping demon’.
Kurosawa gives us a majestic and beautiful landscape through these eight stories. His use of hallucinations and surreal visions can be interpreted as reflections of his own ideas and dreams, giving an emotionally personal touch.
14. Waking Life (Richard Linklater, 2001)
A man observes philosophical debates as he travels through a lucid dream-like state. These dreams illustrate themes such as reality, free will, our relationships with others, and the meaning of life.
Translating the feeling of being in a dream into film is a difficult one. However, Linklater seems to capture it well through his mind-stimulating uncanny animation that shows captured isolated moments rather than a story.
13. Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)
American ballet dancer Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) arrives in Freiberg, Germany, to study dance at the prestigious Tanz Academy. After an immediate series of bizarre and unsettling events, she fears something sinisterly evil haunts the place.
Argento uses colour and sound like a true artist in this horror classic. The film feels like a nightmare through the suspense and dread it creates, with eccentric visuals presenting a world that drifts further from a safe reality.
12. Un Chien Andalou/An Andalusian Dog (Luis Buñuel, 1929)
A film with no plot, Un Chien Andalou explores a disjointed chronology. It uses dream logic to jump from the initial “once upon a time” to “eight years later”.
A pivotal and seminal piece in the Surrealist moment, Buñuel created the film under a goal of “a violent reaction against… ‘avantgarde cine”. His composition of rhythmic images is strikingly unique, with endless interpretation and eye-opening reactions.
11. Climax (Gasper Noe, 2018)
Young dancers gather in a remote, empty school building to rehearse for a dance competition. The all-night celebration soon turns into a hallucinatory nightmare after their drinks are spiked with LSD.
Climax can be summed up as an attack on the senses once the beautiful dance sequence has passed. It’s unapologetic about how bold and aggressive it is, building up on dread constantly.
10. Uzumaki (Higuchinsky, 2000)
Embracing the strange and the surreal, the Japanese culture celebrates fantastical tales of enigmatic charm, with Uzumaki (Vortex) from Ukraine-born director Higuchinsky, presenting such a tale that suffuses horror into a fantasy dream world.
A vivid, visceral tale of horror, Uzumaki follows the inhabitants of a small Japanese town who become increasingly obsessed with and tormented by mysterious spirals. A horrifying tale that is both captivating and oddly repulsive, director Higuchinsky stated that he wanted to make a film like Star Wars before stating in an interview, “Because I’m Japanese, I should do something different”.
9. The Holy Mountain (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973)
Master of the surreal, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain is the Chilean-French filmmaker’s most well-known feature film, traversing genre to embrace a surreal tale influenced by René Daumal and Luis Buñuel.
An unmistakable film of Jodorkovsky’s idiosyncratic world, The Holy Mountain is intoxicating and bewildering, an acid trip suffused with revolutionary creative energy. The untamed illusory dream follows a man, played by Jodorowsky, leading a Christ figure to a mountain of immortal wise men in a colourful kaleidoscopic journey that dances in insanity and celebrates the phantasmagoric.
8. Pink Floyd – The Wall (Alan Parker, Gerald Scarfe, 1982)
Re-establishing the band’s connection with their true fans, whilst excavating into their own identity simultaneously, Alan Parker’s, Pink Floyd – The Wall is a treat for the retinas, a feature-length thrill of animated psychedelia and live-action drama.
Depicting walking hammers, monstrous creatures and apocalyptic visions each working to metaphorically represent existential concepts of war and fascism, Bob Geldof stars as a rock star building an internal and physical wall to block out the outside world. As Alan Parker stated, “It was like nothing anyone had ever seen before – a weird fusion of live-action, story-telling and of the surreal”.
7. Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982)
The first addition to Reggio’s trilogy, Koyaanisqatsi is visual poetry at its finest, a striking reflection that is contextualised within the constructs of modernity, examining how the advance of our technological developments have changed the world forever.
Produced by filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, the director stated the film was “important for people to see,” and helped to distribute the film to a wider audience. The film itself is an exploration of the human landscape, navigating through the desert and into the populated city, where pioneering editing and camera techniques combine with Phillip Glass‘ orchestral score to create a symphony of life. Getting lost in Reggio and Glass’ world is a perplexing, hypnotic treat.
6. Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé, 2009)
There are very few filmmakers with the same innovative eye as the Argentine director Gaspar Noé, having formulated a fascinating landscape of cinema including the likes of Irréversible, Climax and Enter the Void.
Released in 2009, Enter the Void remains one of the most mind-bending, psychological brain-twisters ever made, telling the story of an American drug dealer killed in a drug deal who begins to observe his past life and seek resurrection. A hypnotic, cosmic journey Gaspar Noé does not abide by the rules of cinema utilising first-person filmmaking, ingenious hallucinogenic cinematography and extraordinary editing. Time to go down the rabbit hole.
5. Yellow Submarine (George Dunning, 1968)
Whilst the rest of The Beatles’ films could be seen as an exercise in vanity, Yellow Submarine is a true musical masterpiece. Whilst the band worked to inspire and influence the music industry onstage, Yellow Submarine would impact the future shape of animation.
Perhaps the closest thing you can get to actually experiencing the energy, vibrancy and creativity of The Beatles in contemporary life, Yellow Submarine is a trippy orgasm of colour and psychedelia. Paving the way for the interludes of Terry Gilliam’s Flying Circus, the art of animator Chris Caunter, who also worked on Pink Floyd: The Wall, is truly incredible, coming to life in the ecstatic ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ sequence.
4. Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989)
A filmmaker highly admired by the great Quentin Tarantino, Shinya Tsukamoto’s work on Tetsuo: The Iron Man would help to define his later career, having a seminal influence on the shape of the cyberpunk movement in Japanese cinema.
“In Tetsuo, I really wanted to show Tokyo as an urban jungle, and if you’re living in a concrete jungle, you forget about human instincts, that we are animals,” Tsukamoto explained in an interview. The experimental film, backed by an excellent punk soundtrack, is an insane trip that follows a businessman who is cursed by a strange individual who turns the man into a gross hybrid of flesh and metal.
According to Tsukamoto, Tarantino was so enamoured by his films that he approached the Japanese legend with a special request to produce the third instalment of the Tetsuo series, unfortunately, the project never came to fruition.
3. Belladonna of Sadness (Eiichi Yamamoto, 1973)
Eiichi Yamamoto’s psychedelic animated masterpiece takes us on a gruelling journey using the animated medium to portray some of the most heinous acts known to us, thereby curating a subversive and paradoxical experience.
Told through stunning visual spectacles, Belladonna of Sadness is a beautiful meditation on mysticism, telling the story of a female peasant who is subjected to physical and emotional torture but gains agency over her destiny by utilising the power of witchcraft. Consisting largely of still watercolour paintings influenced by the western art of Gustav Klimt among others, Eiichi Yamamoto is a significant artistic and cinematic triumph.
2. Fantastic Planet (René Laloux, 1973)
Crafted from the mind of the iconic French animator René Laloux, Fantastic Planet has inspired the world of music and experimental film since its release in 1973 as the jewel in the director’s crown alongside such films as Time Masters and Gandahar.
An allegory of human rights and racism, René Laloux’s film is a classic of science fiction, depicting a faraway planet where strange blue giants rule and humanoid rebels are repressed. Laced with an acid-induced floating soundtrack blending psychedelic funk and jazz, Fantastic Planet is a delightful meditation that takes you through a fantasy kingdom terrifically realised and viscerally brought to life.
1. Hausu (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977)
Possibly the most idiosyncratic film of all time, Hausu is a psychedelic trip like no other, featuring a flurry of animation, surreal violence and enigmatic Japanese energy from filmmaking master Nobuhiko Obayashi.
Conjured into the director’s mind after a conversation with his daughter, Hausu follows a group of seven schoolgirls who travel to one of their aunt’s country homes that turns out to possess an ancient evil. For lovers of Japanese culture, and particularly their surreal sense of humour, Hausu is an absolute must, possessing a bizarre energy that is in equal parts unnerving and hilarious.
Suffusing his world with a mix of vivid hand-drawn animation and surreal cinematic choices, Hausu takes the viewer on a dance of phantasmagorical absurdity.
