Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

By Guest Contributor Helen Creighton

They say you should never, ever meet your heroes, whoever ‘they’ are. They are likely right, for a host of reasons – the risk of gushing and embarrassing yourself for life and the unpleasant shattering of a pleasantly-sustaining personal fantasy when said hero turns out to be a bit of a knob amongst them. But villains or those commonly considered so? We project our fantasies – of power, of repositories of near-supernatural evil, of guilt and blame – on them as well. Should we, conversely, meet our century’s villains as purely human subjects, hoping to gain if not sympathy, an understanding of their all too human pathology? This is an approach the Russian auteur Alexander Sokurov has taken in two films from his ‘tetrology of power’ – Adolf Hitler and the Emperor Hirohito of Japan.

Moloch – tellingly named for the ancient Semitic idol who demanded the sacrifice of his people’s children by fire – is Alexander Sokurov’s highly idiosyncratic vision of what might be called the lost weekend of Adolf Hitler. It concerns his retreat to the Bavarian mountains for some rest and relaxation with his inner circle (“Not a word of politics at the table! No Eastern Front!” commands Martin Boorman, neatly setting out the parameters of the film) sometime during 1942, just before the idea of assured German victory had began to permanently unravel. Highly unorthodox for films that deal biographically with recent historical figures, Sokurov prefers to imagine the action (or lack thereof) behind or beyond the obvious great historical moments. Historical documents, in this case Henry Picker’s transcripts of Hitler’s private conversations (indeed Picker is depicted in Moloch, constantly scribbling in a notepad) and Albert Speer’s prison diaries, simply serve as a jumping off point for a more impressionistic, difficult work than your average, straightforward biopic.

The film opens to the stirring, doom-laden strains of Wagner’s Siegfried’s Funeral March, ultimately fading in on the imposing, mist-drenched stone battlements of a reimagined Eagle’s Nest. Just as quickly as he invokes the aloof, grandiose aesthetic of National Socialism, Sokurov deconstructs it with depiction of human frivolities amid the Olympian splendour. A naked Eva Braun amuses herself by strolling atop the battlements. Fully aware she’s being observed by the guards below (she offers them a friendly wave), she begins a series of dancer’s stretches and poses, her inane laughter echoing across the landscape, mingling uneasily with the sounds of munitions. Soon after, she amuses herself by rifling through Hitler’s record collection and putting her feet up on a conference table strewn with remnants of Hitler’s failed artistic career, wiling away the minutes before her beloved ‘Adi’ arrives. So begins Moloch, a strange, unsettling, satirical, occasionally surrealistic and grimly humanizing portrayal of the central figure of the Third Reich.

Later, we are privy to more of the weekend distractions of Hitler, Eva, their companions the Goebbels and Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann. There is an excruciating dinner at which Hitler plays the dour, militant vegetarian (“Who wants some corpse tea?”), and the showing of a newsreel which leads to possibly the weirdest and most bleakly satirical moment of the film as a suddenly bemused Hitler wonders what is this ‘Auschwitz’ that everyone’s talking about and is assured that it’s nothing, just the gossip of women. Each guest competes to offer sycophantic attention to their host whilst bickering bitterly amongst themselves whenever his back is turned. Bormann especially draws ire (Magda Goebbels asserts that he smells bad), the petty rivalries and jealousies recalling not only the well-documented distaste of many of Hitler’s inner circle for each other, but also foreshadowing the Nuremberg hearings at which senior Reich members squabbled like schoolchildren over who should be forced to sit next to weird kid Rudolf Hess.

Then there is the mountaintop picnic which teeters into the surreal as Hitler excuses himself from the jollity to squat and shit in a corner while his immaculately-clad Schutzstaffel watch in amazement through gun sights, then ascending to the crags above to piss and pose heroically, as if in some grotesque perversion of German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich’s aloof figure in the painting ‘Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog’. German art and its relationship with Nazism is an ever-present, unspoken reference in Moloch – Eva’s dance at the roof of the world recalls Triumph of the Will director and then-actress Leni Riefenstahl’s erotic dance to the sea in Arnold Fanck’s 1926 German silent classic ‘The Holy Mountain’, while the the Eagle’s Nest, floating in a sea of mist, bears a certain similarity to Arnold Bocklin’s cemetery painting Isle of the Dead. The elevator entrance to the Eagle’s Nest in its symmetry resembles nothing so much as the glowing, gaping mouth of the ‘Moloch’ machine the workers sacrifice themselves to in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Misty, German romantic landscapes abound, juxtaposed with strange, sinister radio crackles and the distant sound of explosions and gunfire. Figures gather around Hitler in poses that suggest the work of Rembrandt, collected by senior Reich members and co-opted into their ideology when trying to get the Dutch on side post-occupation. Everything is shot though a kind of fog, a soft-focus combined with desaturated colour palette that lends a distinct, weird 40s patina to the frame.

Hitler himself, once deprived of an audience, reveals his pathology as a paranoid hypochondriac, huddling beneath a sheet and complaining dramatically about his fear of cancer to an increasingly impatient and contrarian Eva Braun, who in her vigorous health, vitality, appetite for fun and her need for intimacy seems to represent normalcy in this crowd of psychological grotesques. Hitler seemingly fears death but seems enlivened by the idea of dealing it – in one scene to a deserter, despite the pleas of an intervening priest. He eventually admits to wishing to defeat death itself, at which point a wraith-like Eva pitifully tries to convince him this isn’t possible, to no avail.

Moloch is a slow, complex and oddly uneasy film where nothing really happens apart from iconic figures who have long assumed godlike mantles in public acting like petty, stupid, weird and self-interested human beings in private (like some kind of 1940s celeb-infused reality TV) and I suspect that’s the point Alexander Sokurov – a disciple of Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker, Solaris) and a director who complains of modern audiences ‘requiring everything to be explained to them’ is trying to make. Human urges and struggles entwined with the toxicity of politics and access to unrestrained power may result in the kind of overreaching that ultimately ends in greatness… or moral collapse. Moloch is ultimately philosopher Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann-trial coined phrase ‘the banality of evil’ as oblique, soft-focused art film.

Sokurov’s 2004 feature ‘The Sun’ is perhaps Moloch in reverse, dealing not with a man who has clawed his way to godhood, but rather one who has had godhood thrust upon him – the Emperor Hirohito, regarded by his people as a living god, descended from the Japanese sun goddess Ameratsu, here holed up in a beautifully appointed room in the otherwise brutalist concrete bunker beneath the Imperial Compound in Tokyo. The film takes as its starting point the historical fact of Hirohito’s capitulation to the American forces under General Douglas MacArthur in 1945 and his renunciation of his divinity to a shocked nation. There’s commonality aplenty with Moloch – the stark interiors, the slowness of pace, the desaturated palette, the strange grainy old-school patina that is apparently derived from transfer of digital footage to film stock, and the ominous, doom-laden rumblings of Wagner across the soundtrack, but it offers a much more directly emotionally affecting experience than that satire-infused work that holds its characters at arm’s length.

Hirohito the living god lives a highly circumscribed life, bound by a hierachy and etiquette so strict that even his wife must request an audience to speak with him and where his servants do so much for him that even opening a door on his own proves a difficult task. In stark opposition to Moloch’s central figure, he’s a quiet, sensitive and fairly affable figure, given to deep introspection and remorse and burdened with obvious physical frailties – he twitches and gurns, mouthing words long before he speaks them. He’s thoroughly Japanese and just as thoroughly royal, as sequestered from the modern world as it’s possible to be, yet keeps busts of Charles Darwin and Napoleon on his desk, along with a photo album of Hollywood movie idols and screen goddesses – Humphrey Bogart, Charlie Chaplin and Marlene Dietrich amongst them – the march of progress having penetrated even this old god’s inner sanctum.

While death is a constant reference throughout Moloch, the recurring motif in The Sun is evolution. Hirohito revels in his personal scientific study of marine life even as Japan burns. Even his fever dreams are tinged with this concern – the film’s sole surrealistic, perhaps Salvador Dali-esque moment is an extended sequence where fish, morphed into sinister flying machines, firebomb Tokyo. While the Emperor Napoleon is soon carefully retired to a drawer after the surrender, Darwin remains an inspiration and a reference point throughout the negotiation. There’s a scene where after his first uneasy meeting with a brusque General MacArthur, fraught with cultural misunderstandings and disagreements over the nature of war crimes, he pores frantically over this album, his family album and pictures of his former ally Adolf Hitler in turn, as if each photoset suggests a path – tradition, modernity… or death. He eventually appears at an American-arranged photo conference, with odd little Chaplin-esque mannerisms. He tips his hat and theatrically smells a rose, appalling the Japanese-American translator who believes in his divinity. He’s a smash hit with the foreign press. It’s a manipulation, a performance … but not entirely. He’s as vulnerable, deprived of his cloistered habitat with its deferential servants as the hermit crab he studies during his marine biology sessions is outside its protective shell. He is desperately trying to adapt himself and by default, his nation to their occupiers.

At a later meeting, MacArthur manufactures a reason to leave the room, leaving Hirohito alone. He spies on him, and discovers a man who dances giddily to Bach and takes delight in snuffing out an array candles like a child at a birthday party. From his hiding place, MacArthur smiles for the first time – humanity has won the day. All these moments are pure fiction – there are no transcripts of MacArthur’s meetings with the Emperor of Japan. However, the message is clear – in Sokurov’s historical imaginarium, rigidity is death. Hirohito’s delicate negotiation of power requires adapatation of both self and culture in order for his nation to survive and rise from the ashes.

By Keri O’Shea

As horror has become (somewhat) more seriously considered and appreciated within wider culture in the past fifteen years or so, more and more people have taken it upon themselves to look in closer detail at the make-up of horror. Just who populates the stories that make up the genre? How are the main players characterised? And, in a small but growing community within academia, and elsewhere – just how representative is horror?

From various quarters, horror’s quotas have been found woefully lacking – or, even when there is a proportionate number of, say, women in a narrative, what happens to them has found itself endlessly debated too. We’re probably all at least tangentially aware of the Women in Horror movement, which seeks to champion one gender’s achievements over another’s for a period of time to achieve those most nebulous and yet credible of modern aims, ‘awareness’ and ‘recognition’. And yet, the buck doesn’t stop here. From within the WIH movement, other voices have emerged. These follow a very logical current, given the stream of consciousness they’re in; if we accept that women are marginalised, then what about Women of Colo(u)r? And there are sub-divisions within this – what about Latinas? Indians? Maoris? Do they enjoy visibility, and if not, what the hell is wrong with this picture?

There are yet further layers of inadequate representation. In a post on the Day of the Woman blog this year, we learned that the following females might have reason to be displeased also. This group is trans-women, and pardon me if I cut and paste this, as with apologies I speak limited Tumblrese:

“…all non-cisgender gender identities including: transgender, transsexual, transvestite, genderqueer, genderfluid, non-binary, genderfuck, genderless, agender, non-gendered, third gender, two-spirit, bigender, and trans man and trans woman.”

Phew. You’d have hard work to get that on a student union teeshirt. However, my issue isn’t particularly with all of that terminology. Nor do I have a problem if people feel or decide that they don’t want to espouse or belong to conventional genders – whatever, it’s not my business, but what I do take issue with is that, somehow, having self-identified as ‘non-binary’ or what-have-you, they (or their online champions, and make no mistake, these exist) then begin to find fault with a fantasy genre which they feel owes them proportionate and sympathetic representation (and there’s that word again). People seem to feel better when it turns out they figure they have it worse. A lot of the thinking behind this clamour baffles me.

I’ll reiterate. Horror is fantasy. At its most fantastical, it routinely shows us ghosts, aliens, monsters and demons; even when it is of the ‘inspired by real events’ persuasion, its killers and stalkers are routinely omnipotent and omniscient. In any incarnation, it is a fictionalised world filled with threat, nastiness – and baddies, of every stripe. It has no obligation to inspire us or to show us heroic versions of ourselves, however we might self-identify; in the broadest possible terms, horror gives us the superhuman, or the very worst of humanity blown up to cartoonish proportions. You might find yourself rooting for the Final Girl, and god knows we’ve heard enough about that in recent years, but that’s all part of the fantasy too I’m afraid. It seems bizarre, even pigheaded to criticise a genre where people routinely come back from the dead for its lack of positive role models. Might you not look elsewhere for them? There are other film genres, and other art forms, which are highly motivated by social realism. Perhaps they could already provide you with the invented characters you seek to aspire to, rather than horror being found lacking. Modern horror is by no means perfect. We say so all the time here. But it is not, and has no obligation to be a perfect, idealised reflection of modern Western culture (and I’m sorry, my inherent cisgender hetero-white privilege probably forbids me from commenting on other hemispheres). If anything, horror will always do the opposite. It will always blow up our anxieties to nightmarish proportions, and make us confront them – even laugh at them.

It’s not just current horror which gets chastised, though. The plague which haunts modern academia and by eventual extension, popular culture is the urge to judge the narratives of the past by our current mores. Every year without fail, for example, someone discovers that horror genius H P Lovecraft held some frightfully beyond-the-pale opinions about other races – and they disown him, because they cannot get their heads around the fact that he existed in another time and place, and as such held views which were far more acceptable there and then. Even Tom and Jerry cartoons now have to come with a warning, because otherwise we might assume that Amazon are tacitly racist due to the fact that they sell a cartoon made upwards of seventy years ago. A cartoon, which comes complete with all of the overblown stereotypes of its own time (as well as a talking dog and a cat with opposable thumbs…) Judging the past by our own values is as pointless as it is stupid. One day, you can rest assured that the generations of the future will judge our values and concerns, no doubt finding them confusing and concerning too. It also displays extreme arrogance, the arrogance which assumes human development is a straight line moving from the Dark Ages to an enlightened future, and just needs a hardcore of dedicated individuals online to tidy up a few aspects of social justice. Fat chance, and looking squarely at the past to do this is to undertake the noble task of shooting fish in a barrel.

In her article ‘Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Trans* Woman? On Horror and Transfemininity’, writer Mey comments on the fact that trans* people have a rough time of it in horror cinema. Whilst she says that she loves horror movies and finds them cathartic, she nonetheless takes issue with the way in which trans* people in particular are demonised in the genre (presumably having no truck with the demonisation of anyone else, or at least not so much). Some of the examples she gives are from psychic ghost story movie (!) Insidious Chapter 2, the characterisation of Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, a film made nearly twenty-five years ago, and Sleepaway Camp, made over thirty years ago.

Whilst I think the relative age and sub-genres of the films are relevant to a degree, I’m surprised in this case – and everywhere I see it – that my fellow horror viewers are perfectly happy to watch any manner of horrific fantasy on their screens, just as long as it doesn’t infringe on their own particular terrain of self-identification in any way unpalatable to them, whatever that terrain happens to be. Of course, saying as much runs the risk of bringing down a tsunami of outrage and indignation, usually involving a game of Privilege Top Trumps, or in other words, the modern means of devaluing anything you might have to say due to something out of your personal control. The point still stands.

Look, Buffalo Bill is no more representative of transgendered people than he is of residents of Virginia or of dog owners (and let’s not forget the fact that Thomas Harris expressly says in the novel that Buffalo Bill is NOT transgender at all – a fact which ardent horror fan Mey overlooks, out of ignorance or convenience). He is an overblown and grotesque figure, a murderer and tormenter, belonging to a made-up world (although arguably based on the very real figure of Ed Gein, who did skin women). Where is the merit in looking back in time and bewailing the absence of positive role models? Placing obligations upon the past is a dead-end street. It also smacks of an inability to watch films for entertainment, of a very modern preoccupation with fairness in fantasy, of watching beady-eyed for any negative representation of anyone currently deemed appropriately marginal (then complaining about it).

Will this idealised perfect world where every group in modern society can champion a positive role model in horror lead to better films? Hardly. Much of horror’s power is in its cruelty – to everyone present in its story. Many of the best horror films ever made have been bold enough to circumvent a neat, happy Hollywood ending; you’re meant to feel challenged, meant to feel shocked. Furthermore, many of these classic, brilliant films came from a milieu which didn’t share our predilection for outraged anxiety and were probably made by straight white males, ugh. If we are going to go down this path of demanding positive and proportionate representation though, must all our villains eventually follow suit? Can we hate and fear anyone, or will this be in some way traceable to some invented misfortune in their invented past which should make us nod and understand their woes, or ask that we make other considerations? Look at the array of dysfunctional families, low socioeconomic backgrounds, abusive relationships and mental health concerns which have dogged our antagonists in horror. Should we not bewail this unfairness too? And how is the new wave of proportionality to be ensured, assessed and maintained? That last bit isn’t a rhetorical question, by the way. I’m genuinely mystified as to who will ensure everyone has the champion they seem to want. ‘Better’ is a term infrequently agreed on. ‘More’, likewise.

With such a mindset, one which is held by a hubbub of voices in modern culture, we could be in danger of losing the pleasure of immersion in the sorts of imaginative, daring and downright scary fiction which horror can bestow. The drip-drip-drip of dialogue about privilege has so far brought little to the genre, in my opinion. An endless footnote of unease, distracting the eye from the way in which horror has always been overblown and discomfiting, and should remain so. If you have an eye on quotas, though, perhaps we can agree that at the most basic level it’s the behaviour of the person which should matter, not their gender, race, weight, sexuality or anything else. In such case, it’s not Buffalo Bill’s transgendered state, but his actions in hacking up women which makes him scary; ditto for every monster, human or non-human, since horror cinema was born, when it comes down to it – and we can probably find a monster in every form down through the years. When it comes to social anxieties, horror will reflect some – sure, of course it will. But it needn’t be the source of new ones.

To come back to the distinction between real life and imagined, as well as my point about human development not in fact being an unalterable straight line towards progress; there are many very real, very terrifying infringements upon all of our lives out there right now, and as such, the determination to police the horror genre for a wealth of axes to grind which we are genuinely privileged to be able to do seems dangerously more than petty. Horror is fundamentally born of escapism, not realism, and if your chief concern is with the latter then by all means, deal with the real. You may find that’s more scary these days than anything horror can throw at you.

By Matt Harries

(For the first part of Matt’s feature, click here.)

Onwards, to 1978, and LSD’s uneasy relationship with public perception continues with a pair of little known films that act as the unwanted flashbacks of the acid generation. In Blue Sunshine, the plot revolves around the premise that a group of individuals who took a particular brand of LSD back in the day (the titular Blue Sunshine) inexplicably and suddenly lose all their body hair, lapse into psychotic fugues, and embark on poorly choreographed ‘killing sprees’. The first of these murderous events implicates our hero Jerry Zipkin (Zalman King), who spends the rest of the film running about ineffectually attempting to prove his innocence, somewhat aided by his girlfriend Alicia (Deborah Sweeney).

There is an attempt to flesh this out with a flimsy ‘political thriller’ angle as Zipkin traces the original dealer of BS a few yards up the corridor of power, namely to budding congressman Edward Flemming (Mark Goddard) and his lumbering henchman (not to mention former BS devotee) Wayne Mulligan (Ray Young). The film then climaxes (comes down is more apt) with Zipkin, armed with a dart gun, stalking the now mainly bald Mulligan, who having earlier erupted into a hilarious sweaty rage caused by loud disco music, staggers like a cheap Karloff impersonator through the home-wares section of a shopping mall. In a manner wholly indicative of the lightweight nature of the film, it all ends with a few lines of portentous text which attempt to create a frisson of there being ‘unaccounted’ quantities of Blue Sunshine still at large…

The highlight of this lame but accidentally funny film is the performance of Zalman King as Jerry Zipkin. Tellingly, ‘Zippy’ gives a performance which is several microdots above anyone else for sheer bug-eyed, lapel grabbing lunacy, while his impressive mane gives the impression that he could break into alopecia totalis induced savagery at any point. The fact that he is completely sober adds unintentional humour to a weak but amusingly ridiculous film that is about as trippy as an episode of Murder She Wrote.

That same year saw the release of British horror Killer’s Moon. This low budget effort sees a bus load of school girls heading off to some kind of rural choir competition. Sure enough their bus breaks down and they are forced to walk into the depths of the cold night seeking shelter. As if their luck was not bad enough, there has also been a recent and highly embarrassing escape by a trio of killers from psychiatric confinement. Apparently this notorious bunch did not have to work hard for their escape, for despite their crimes they were in a very low level security facility. What is remarkable is that the treatment they were under was LSD based. This left them believing that they were not in the waking world but in fact dreaming, absolved from guilt, and literally free to carry out their murderous desires without consequence. Sure enough they happen upon the off-season hotel where our bus load of young lovelies is staying, and the blood soon starts to flow. Our terrible trio occasionally question the nature of their ‘dream’, and raise huge doubts over the efficacy of a course of treatment that had a decidedly 1960s quality to it in its rather permissive and drug based nature.

I Drink Your Blood, Blue Sunshine and Killer’s Moon are all pretty much low level schlock – films that are entertaining enough in a laughable kind of way, and pretty hard to take seriously. They share a number of similarities though – the left over bad vibes of the acid generation, reflected by the distinct connection made between LSD and the most hideous blood letting. Blue Sunshine seems to hint at the possibility of acid rearing its head in later life, perhaps a kind of paranoia over the potential of acid casualties, not just being the typical burnout type, but also anyone who took acid ‘back in the day’. Killer’s Moon casts grim aspersions upon the use of LSD in psychiatry, again reasoning that ‘freedom’ equates with some kind of unleashing of primal atavistic instincts. Acid had never been reduced to such low standing in cinema, cast out to cinema’s outer reaches, a vector for the unseemly excesses of a fallen generation. However that was all to change come 1980. Once again LSD was to find its place at the fulcrum of human evolutionary potential – with more terrifying implications than ever before.

To say that Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980) is an LSD film would be perhaps be stretching the influence of that individual drug. In fact LSD is not actually taken during the film. Instead, entheogens, in particular Amanita Muscaria (Fly Agaric) and Ayahuasca, are the preferred psychedelics. However, despite not playing a starring role in the film, LSD can still be counted as a major influence, being of course one of the most widely used and intensely researched of the hallucinogenic drugs. Altered States is based upon Paddy Chayefsky’s book of the same name, which was itself based on the work of John C. Lilly, the American psychonaut whose research included extensive study of LSD and Ketamine. Bizarrely, he also gave LSD to dolphins as part of his research into larger-brained mammals. Another key area of his research involved the use of isolation tanks, and this combination of hallucinogenic drug and sensory deprivation forms the basis for Altered States. The lineage between Hoffman’s work and that of Lilly is clear, and it is within this historical framework that the film begins.

Doctor Edward Jessup (William Hurt) is a hugely driven and ambitious scientist who, in the spirit of Lilly, places himself at the centre of his experiments, floating in an old isolation tank as part of his sensory deprivation studies. His studies of schizophrenia convince him that madness may just be a different state of consciousness. Spurred on by his own hallucinatory experience, rich in religious allegory, Jessup clearly believes he is inching towards divine revelation. In order to facilitate even more powerful and revelatory experiences, Jessup turns to entheogens – substances used in a the shamanic rites of, in this case, a tribe indigenous to Mexico. Upon sampling the concoction cooked up by the tribe’s shaman, he experiences a series of bizarre and powerful visions. So, armed with a new fervour – and a good quantity of the sacred mushroom – he returns to the States, and the isolation tank.

Whereas in The Trip, Peter Fonda’s Paul experiences revelatory visions and religious allegories, they pertain in the most part to his own personal interior world. In Altered States, Jessup’s fascination with these inner perspectives extends only as far as they enable him to tap into something more profound, something as old as life on earth itself. “There are six billion years of memory in our minds”, he exclaims at one point. As he begins to experiment with the Mexican mushroom and the isolation tank, Jessup relays his experiences of travelling into mankind’s evolutionary past. Things go further than mere hallucinations though, Jessup seeming to devolve into a primordial state and undergo ever greater, more physically dangerous transformations that threaten to annul him from reality as we know it.

Altered States is in many ways an extraordinary piece of cinema. We witness brilliant minds churning forth dialogue at high speed; ideas and arguments and counter-arguments which we have barely the time to digest before they are gone. Swept up in this tide of scientific boundary-pushing, Jessup’s relationship with his fellow academic wunderkind Emily (Blair Brown) becomes so much “clatter and clutter” to him. Far from being grounded by his status as a father and husband, the concerns of his own life take on a secondary status to the extraordinary inner life witnessed during his experiments. These are represented with some of the most intense visuals ever seen on the big screen, representing a large hit of director Ken Russell’s twin obsessions of sex and religion, a heavy dose of apocalyptic intensity, and some truly out-there interpretations of pseudo-science. For the first time we are witnessing some of the potential of research begun almost forty years previously but once again, it is hard not to detect a cautionary element behind all the craziness. In selling his soul for the great truth, Dr Edward Jessup almost loses any vestige of his own humanity in the process.

We now arrive at the last film of this epic trip, and fittingly we have come full circle. Nearly 20 years after Altered States, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas was made. In attempting to adapt Hunter S. Thompson’s 1972 book of the same name, bringing a tale of such mind-bending excess to the big screen would require an alchemical blend of talents to make it work. For this director Terry Gilliam of Monty Python eventually wound up as the director, while Johnny Depp produced one of the most memorable performances of his career as Thompson. Benicio Del Toro was equally impressive as Dr Gonzo, the name given to Thompson’s real life partner in crime Oscar Zeta Acosta. In the same way the cast was a propitious mix of talents, so was the drug supply as detailed by Thompson himself in the book;

“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers, downers, screamers, laughers and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.”

So, like Altered States, this was not strictly speaking an LSD film. However, it takes more of a leading role this time, as Messrs Thompson and Gonzo take the concept of field-based research to a whole new level – indeed ‘Gonzo’ was the name of the kind of journalism that Thompson pioneered. Like John C. Lilly before him, he believed in placing himself – and LSD – at the very epicentre of his story. The story, if it can be called a story, follows the twosome as they embark on a drug fuelled rampage through Las Vegas, literally laying waste to two hotel rooms and the aforementioned supply of substances, ostensibly in the name of journalism, Thompson’s assignments being to cover a cross-desert motorcycle race, and later the National District Attorney’s conference on drugs. Of course, describing the action in this linear fashion only tells half the tale. The whole trip is literally that – a psychedelic journey deep into the conservative, booze-addled heart of the American Dream. Thompson’s purpose is not lofty, in the sense that Edward Jessup or Albert Hoffman had lofty ideals. Nor is it a cautionary tale, or not in the common sense. For although we see the pitfalls of almost indescribable excess, we also get the distinct impression the protagonists are often having a whale of a time. Certainly their experiences are deftly presented by Gilliam to show both the brain meltingly hallucinatory and yet the equally bizarre reality that is everyday life.

Unlike The Trip, with Fonda’s character an psychedelic neophyte, Thompson is a man with an appetite and capacity for drugs – as well as all the attendant carnage that ensues – well beyond that of the average person. There is though, a certain truth to be revealed by such excess, such pushing at the soft boundaries of reality. The ‘truth’ as such, espoused by Thompson, does in the end spell a kind of death knell for the dreams of the LSD generation, circa 1967;

“What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped create… a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the acid culture. The desperate assumption that somebody, or at least some force, is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.”

For Thompson the highest point of the so-called acid culture was a time of wonder, a time when it was enough to say you were there, that you were alive at that precise time – whatever it really meant. But LSD advocate that he was in some ways, the idea that anyone could spend a few dollars and find enlightenment was shown to be inherently false. For Altered States’ Dr Jessup, he too discovered that in the ultimate search for the self, there were no comforting absolute truths which to gain succour. The final truth he discovered is that there is no final truth. It is his wife Emily, who refers to the pain Jessup feels after experiencing his journey of anti-discovery;

“We hide from it, we succumb to it, mostly we defy it! We build fragile little structures to keep it out. We love, we raise families, we work, we make friends. We write poems…”

Who knows what Dr Albert Hoffman envisioned when he considered “who we were meant to be”. The cinematic journey undertaken by LSD, or the acid culture of the 60s that came to define it, is one which mirrors mankind’s own search for truth. A creator of pure fear; a tool of great insight and wonder; a guide on an out-of-body journey into our evolutionary past. Or perhaps, just a fine way to ‘freak out’. Courting both the scientist and the hippie, an object of both fear and wonder, LSD has inspired generations of film makers. Perhaps its greatest lesson is that for all that truth itself is transitory, it is the enduring human experience, in all its multifaceted glory, that is the only reality we need concern ourselves with.

By Matt Harries

It is 1943. Dr Albert Hoffman of Sundoz Labs, Switzerland, sets off on one of the more notable bicycle rides in history. Through accidental absorption of the drug he synthesised in 1938, Hoffman became aware of the remarkable properties of LSD-25. He ingested a deliberate, and much larger dose, some days later – the first deliberate acid trip. Little could he have realised how his actions on that day would echo down the years. Indeed he remarked himself, upon his 100th birthday in 2006:

“In human evolution it has never been as necessary to have this substance LSD. It is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be.”

There is no doubt that LSD is a powerful substance. In attempting to recreate its visionary, hallucinatory glories, what better medium could there be than cinema? For cinema allows representation of the visual aspect of ‘tripping’ in a way that is surely unparalleled in other artistic media. Not only can the vivid, mirage-like nature of hallucinogenic activity be represented, so too can the dizziness and disorientation, the heart-poundingly revelatory. The reality-disturbing. The downright twisted.

For one of cinema’s finest examples of this parlous state of being, witness Terry Gilliam’s 1998 classic Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. Our intrepid hero, the erstwhile Doctor of Journalism H.S Thompson (played by Johnny Depp), and his attorney Dr.Gonzo (a demonic Benicio del Toro), descend upon the lobby of a hotel in the hallucinatory neon jungle of 70s Vegas. Their task: to check into said hotel. Thompson, his system under the influence of a literal trunk-full of the kind of chemical arsenal that would be enough to raze a boutique music festival, is beset by visions that would threaten the sanity of most people. A flood of thick blood, a woman’s head erupting into a giant Moray eel, as well as more ‘recognisable’ visuals such as those induced by those typically mind-warping ’70s hotel carpets all combine with the frankly lunatic assembly of ‘punters’ in the bar, to make the apparently simple task of checking in and grabbing a drink into some kind of psychedelic voyage in and of itself.

Fear and Loathing…an apt description perhaps of cinema’s own portrayal of this potential harbinger of mankind’s evolution. Certainly for every moment of blissed out psychedelia, there are others which tell a different story. For every hippy tale of fractals and universal harmony there is a counter-tale, what Hunter Thompson described as “meathook realities”. Even in its most riotous and celebratory expressions, such as Fear & Loathing itself, there is a flipside of equally mind-shattering proportions. Even the noble dreams of Dr Hoffman himself form the basis for one of the most terrifying cinematic journeys through the doors of perception. Here, in the name of scientific research, Brutal As Hell takes a look at some of cinema’s notable examples of the ‘LSD film’ – not just the psychedelic flick, but the ones in which LSD itself played a major role.

LSD, far from the modern perception of it being a ‘hippy’ or rave culture drug, has always been inextricably linked with the scientific community. From Hoffman’s initial synthesis, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert’s clinical study, through to John C. Lily’s ‘psychonautic’ research, LSD has always been subjected to rigorous analysis. So it was that against a laboratory backdrop came perhaps the first explicit mention of acid in cinema, with Vincent Price vehicle The Tingler (1959). This camp classic centres on the studies of Price, who discovers the presence of a centipede-like parasite – which he dubs the Tingler – that affixes itself to a person’s spine. Nourished by the fear of its host, if left to grow unchecked it has the capacity to kill by crushing the spine. Luckily, Price discovers that in order to weaken the creature and prevent death, the host must emit a scream. This leads to much silliness as the rather lumpen puppet Tingler escapes into a cinema, of all places. We hear Price exhorting the audience to “scream, scream for your lives!” as the screen darkens to mirror the lights going out in the film. Presumably the idea was to whip the real life cinema goer into a frenzy of terrified shrieking. The audience participation element was enhanced by the use, in some larger stateside theatres (and indeed at the Abertoir Horror Festival in Wales some years back) of the “Percepto!” gimmick; this was a buzzer attached to some seats designed to simulate the tingling sensation that Price discovers is caused by the titular parasite. All this silliness pales in comparison with my personal highlight of the film; Vincent Price tripping. This unlikely act, shot in plain old black and white and without any of the visual effects that become so prevalent in future hallucinogenic film scenes, sees Price overcome with pure fear. The very reason he takes the drug was because, as his partner David (Darryl Hickman) says “it gives you nightmares” – and what better way to study the fear hungry Tingler, right? Not long after injecting himself with twice the normal dosage (steady, Vince!), we see him in the full throes of a psychedelic breakdown, as he lurches from side to side, dramatically attempting to stop the walls from closing in, all the while affecting his unique take on a man racked by vivid hallucinatory torment.

Focusing the acid experience through the filter of Vincent Price’s camp monologues is, as you might imagine, bloody funny and in keeping with the film’s general air of enjoyable nonsense. What is interesting about this cinematic debut of LSD is the connection not with life-affirming hallucinatory revelation, but with fear. Price takes the drug to induce pure terror, and boy does he experience it! It’s a fitting demonstration of the relatively conservative, psychedelically inexperienced society of 1959, prior to hippie culture and all its now familiar tropes.

Fast forward to 1967 and western society had undergone an incredible change. Flower-Power. The Swinging Sixties. Hippy culture. Revolution and revelation. Consciousness-expansion. The slow grind toward a society built upon ideas of equality and freedom. LSD is indelibly linked with this heady, epochal era. Now, for the psychedelically savvy cinema goer, acid has become a more familiar facet of modern life, a counter-cultural symbol of inner discovery and outer awareness. Rather than inducing pure fear, acid is now an intriguing possibility for the curious and adventurous.

Enter Roger Corman’s The Trip, in which we are literally taken on a voyage of discovery as Peter Fonda’s film director decides to take acid in the wake of his divorce from his adulterous wife. Fonda’s character Paul chooses a straight ‘guide’ John (Bruce Dern) to help him on his way, dropping the stuff in the coast-side split-level psychedelic wonderland apartment that John owns. You have to question the wisdom of the whole affair, as the bearded Dern exudes an innate natural menace and the place itself is already about as close to an acid trip as home decoration could ever come. Also, what sort of LSD ‘guru’ lets someone on acid go swimming?! Perhaps unsurprisingly ‘freaked out’, Paul escapes and heads off into the night, leaving John to try and track him down.

We follow Paul on his blundering, paranoid journey throughout the evening, during which he wanders haphazardly from location to location while heavily under the influence of LSD. What stands out most about our viewing of Paul’s experience is that we ‘see’ the very same visions he does. Rather than only watching someone acting ‘high’, we are assaulted by a cornucopia of abstract patterns of fantastical colour and intensity, created through the use of strobe lights and liquid projectors the likes of which were used at rock concerts at the time. As well as these classically psychedelic visuals we also witness a recurring scene of Paul being pursued by figures on black horses, one of several scenes which are symbolic of his paranoid subconscious. So we have multiple viewpoints; Paul’s own eye view of the swirling, spinning visuals; scenes from within his psyche reflective of his own inner turmoil (most of which involves his wife); and finally we, the viewers, see Paul himself as if we were bystanders.

The three way depiction of the Trip makes it a more complete encapsulation of the acid experience than had been witnessed in cinema until that point. However, overlords American Pictures International (for whom Corman had produced a whole host of horror-themed pictures in previous years) were wary of the film being seen as a positive LSD story. At the end Paul stands looking out at the ocean, stretching langourously after a night which ended with him bedding the lovely Glenn (Salli Sachse). Despite him appearing to be a little spaced out, he seems relaxed. At the last though, the camera jumps in close on Paul’s face. An optically inserted effect makes the screen appear to shatter. The suggestion is clear – Paul is still in complete turmoil. He has not resolved the complex issues that plagued his journey of the previous night – he is still psychologically broken. By all accounts, Corman was most displeased with this summation. After all, the character of Paul was in part based on Corman himself, the director having recently enjoyed a positive experience of LSD. So it was that another perspective is added to the narrative. The conservative powers-that-be, represented by the studio itself, reflecting a very different agenda to the director, and far less eager to present LSD experience in a favourable light.

Generally, portrayals of LSD continued to focus more on the negative, the bad trip providing an apparently richer set of possibilities in cinematic terms. Peter Fonda, alongside fellow The Trip star Dennis Hopper, would return as an acid-head in the classic search-for-freedom picture Easy Rider (1970). The two of them hit the road and embark on a journey of discovery fuelled by grass, gas, cocaine and – in one memorable scene – LSD. After wandering their boozy way through New Orleans, the duo, along with a couple of prostitutes (played by Karen Black and Toni Basil) wind up in a cemetery. Not the first choice of most would-be trippers, and so it would prove that the importance of ‘set and setting’, long espoused by Timothy Leary, would again become clear.

We don’t see any of the kaleidoscopic imagery of Peter Fonda’s last big screen trip. Instead, the bleached bone white of the cemetery forms the backdrop to action intertwined with Catholic prayer and heavily spliced footage of the foursome, acting out a collective bad trip in between and on top of the tombs. Fonda spends much of his time with his face pressed up against a statue of a woman, sobbing to his recently deceased mother. Karen Black’s character at times resembles someone plucked from a madhouse, crouching and cackling and crying. Her female companion wastes no time in getting naked, and Dennis Hopper…well he pretty much continues in the same vein as he does the rest of the film. Certainly, unlike other iconic moments during the film, there are no attempts to beautify the experience here.

Grindhouse ‘classic’ I Drink Your Blood (1970) presented the audience with the triple threat of hippies, acid and Satanism. Bad enough you would think, for a remote and isolated populace, without the possibility of rabies infecting the whole bunch of them and turning them into blood-crazed hydrophobic maniacs. Films of this ilk are hardly hotbeds for socio-political commentary – and this one is no different. Again though, cinema can be reflective of cultural norms, and once again LSD, ostensibly the drug of the ‘peace and love’ generation, is linked with people whose lives are in fact some kind of grotesquely debauched moral vacuum. After all, as gang leader Horace Bones (Bhaskar Roy Chowdury) announces at the film’s beginning – “Let it be known, Brothers and Sisters, that Satan was an acid head.” What would Dr Hoffman have said upon hearing his discovery linked not just with the hippy menace, but with the Prince of Lies himself?

Part 2 of Matt’s feature coming soon…