Last Updated on July 23, 2021
Congrats to Tim Burton and the juggernaut that his version of ALICE IN WONDERLAND became this past weekend. Mediocre reviews aside, the thing kicked ass and took names.
Thinking about Burton got me musing on the lack of much straight ahead horror on his resume, but there are always strong genre elements in anything he does. And along with that comes his usual bag of perspective benders and visual craziness.
In other words, if there’s a filmmaker more suited to fans of tripping, then I don’t know who it is. So keeping in mind movies that may expand when viewed in an altered state, let’s get down with the trippiest damn horror out there.
And spit bullets dammit! I definitely want to hear your stories on this one.
WARNING – LOTS OF WTF BELOW!
10. DREAMSCAPE
Back in the day when Dennis Quaid was still the hot young actor on the Hollywood scene he popped up in this underappreciated flick about government sponsored dream assassins. You can imagine that since a large portion of the movie deals with people moving through dream states it gets weird, especially since personal nightmares and Freudian histories get manipulated early and often. Sweet dreams.
9. BRAIN DEAD
Possibly the trippiest thing about this bastard (not Peter Jackson’s) is that it stars both Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton. On top of that, there’s all kinds of boogeying with brain extraction, confused center of reality and did I mention the surplus of Bill’s? It’s not exactly a tour de force when it comes to the direction, but the story content more than makes up for it.
8. ALTERED STATES
Buy the ALTERED STATES DVD here
You know that if you’ve got a movie that not only introduced William Hurt, but also contains one of his oddest roles, it’s gonna be one for the books. The story ends up getting a bit heavy with death of God musings and such going on, but the fun part is all the reality shifting, drug induced, sensory deprevation experimentation. Grab yourself a lava lamp and check this sucker out.
7. REPULSION
Leave a man hating, paranoid psychotic up to her own steadily growing agorophobic devices and just see what happens. Under the sure direction of everyone’s favorite kiddie rapist Roman Polanski, Catherine Deneuve gives a great perfomance as a woman slowly breaking down, but then again, maybe just returning to form. People definitely die, though, so that’s good.
6. NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET
Buy the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET DVD here
Freddy’s been around so long that he’s getting retrod, but can you remember what it was like the first time you saw NOES? It was, quite simply, a nightmare. You weren’t safe anywhere, and the thing we cling to most dearly, our slumber, was turned into a deathscape of razors and pain. Wes Craven may have dropped off a bit post-SCREAM, but when it comes to outright mindf*ckery he gave us one of the classics.
STAY TUNED FOR PART 2!
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