Hallucinogenic 80s Sci-Fi Thriller Will Expose You To An Entirely New Reality

By Robert Scucci
| Published 29 seconds ago

Sensory experiments are as old as time and have been used as a means to achieve a higher sense of consciousness. Whether you’re an avid fan of Tool’s music in your attempts to pry open your third eye (we get it, you like polyrhythms and the fat riff), or like to dabble with illicit substances that allow you to break free from your current state of reality to see the world from a different perspective, there’s certainly more than one way to skin a cat. Or, in the case of 1980’s Altered States, no cat gets skinned, but rather a goat bled out after ingesting highly concentrated doses of primordial flowers before laying down in a sensory deprivation tank that makes both your mental and physical being regress into a more primal iteration that modern science has no way to properly document.

Debating mind over matter in the most visceral ways possible, Altered States is a visual feast of uneasy imagery and such a trip in its own right that you can watch this film stone sober and still feel like your grey matter has been scrambled by outside forces. Or maybe you just need to stop eating so much spicy food before nodding off on the couch. Whatever way this film ends up triggering you, just know its content is coming from the most horrifying place we know: our subconscious.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong? 

Altered States gets its point across by aggressively thrusting its concept of sensory regression onto the viewer through vivid hallucinations that play out like the kind of sleep-paralysis fever dream you can’t quite wake up from. When Columbia University psychopathologist Edward Jessup’s (William Hurt) study of individuals afflicted with schizophrenia suggests that altered states of consciousness are just as objectively real as those experienced in the physical world, he becomes fixated on becoming a lab rat through risky human trials involving hallucinogens and sensory deprivation. 

Living in this self-inflicted, existentially hostile state as a means to break ground on his research, Edward’s work consumes him, which puts considerable strain on his relationship with his wife, Emily (Blair Brown), who has also devoted her life to her research but thinks he’s pushing his own just a little too far.

Looking for his next fix in the name of science, Edward continues to put himself under and document his findings, much to the concern of his colleagues, Arthur Rosenberg (Bob Balaban) and Mason Parrish (Charles Haid). Having reason to believe that his mental experiments have influenced a profound shift in his physical being, Edward presses forward so he can prove his hypothesis with some level of tangibility.

His consciousness and subconsciousness contain magnitudes, and Emily believes he may actually be on the precipice of breaking ground on wholly unexplored psychological territory, but his behavior becomes increasingly volatile as he continues to lose himself in the work. He’s either a man who’s gone loony from too many experimental doses of highly concentrated hallucinogens, or his mind has gone to a place so incomprehensible that he simply doesn’t yet know how to articulate his findings. 

Stop By For The Philosophy, Stick Around For The Brain Melting

Leaning heavily into its visual storytelling, Altered States is an assault on the senses in the best kind of way. Whenever Edward goes under, we see and hear what he does, and it’s enough to make you want to tape your eyes shut and plug your ears because even witnessing his unraveling second-hand makes you want to retreat into a cold, dark, quiet room to center yourself after being exposed to such a high level of rapid-fire, kaleidoscopic madness. During the empty calm you find between these jarring segments, we bear witness to a lucid man trying to make sense of what he experienced on the other side.

If you don’t end up swallowing your own tongue while facing the shock-cut insanity blasting out of your screen and melting your face off, you’ll wonder if this is why the human brain is such a dangerous place to live while attempting to tap into some ancient, incomprehensible level of knowledge that could destroy the fabric of reality as we know it if left unchecked. If you’re not so fortunate, you could always bite down on your wallet until the dust settles and reality snaps back into place as if it was all just some sort of bad dream.

Altered States is streaming on Tubi.