Top 10 Trippy Horror Movies You Don't Want to See While Stoned!

Last Updated on August 3, 2021

It’s Friday 4/20 y’all, which means there’s only one relevant question to ask…how high are you right now? Can you even remember?!

Well, not to harsh your mellow, but we’re here to f*ck your altered state of mind right the hell up today. On purpose. Here’s how. You know how sometimes you get too damn stoned before watching a movie, a horror movie, in a way that totally messes with your mind while watching it? Don’t front, you know exactly what we mean. We’re talking about trippy, psychadelic, hallucinogenically tinted films that, like FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, actually make you feel stoned while watching it. And that’s when you go into it stone sober. Well, consider this our guru-guide to get through to the other side. We have a double-fistful of inherently trippy movies you do not want to witness when severely impaired. These are our Top 10 Trippy Horror Movies You Don’t Want to See While Stoned. Happy 4/20!

#1. 2001: A SPACE ODDYSSEY (1968)

Zoom in on old Dave Bowman’s head real quick, would ya? Yeah, see his What The F*ck face? That’s the same interminably etched expression I have every time I finish Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODDYSSEY, a landmark all time classic that turned 50 years old this month. The soulful mystification of the movie is as profound as it is ironclad, the artful existential journey as lasting as ever. To watch the movie sober is to come out inebriated, so it only makes sense the movie’s theatrical staying power in the early going was born out of the late 60s crowd dropping in and tuning out during the legendary star-gate sequence. And you can understand why. The Oscar winning SFX and psychadelic rumination on where we came from and how we got here is too gravid to contemplate while clearheaded, let alone wasted!

#2. HOUSE (1977)

Raise the pipe, better yet hit the pipe, if you’ve seen the super freaky, fun and f*cked-up 1977 Japanese horrorshow HOUSE, a movie so bizarrely surreal that it defies all possible explanation. Yeah, the best right? That is, until you torque down one too many bong-loads, then you aren’t sure if what your seeing is intended or if your ravaged imagination has made its way onto the screen somehow. No joke. Directed by Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, the story sees an innocent schoolgirl and her six classmates visit her warped auntie’s house, only to find the crazy old bat out to lethally torment each of them in a spate of strange and grisly ways. With equal parts wacky humor and jaw-dropping terror, HOUSE will make you trip balls without imbibing a single substance!

#3. SANTA SANGRE (1989)

As it relates to the regaled psychadelia of the borderline insane Chilean auteur Alejandro Jodorowski, most tend to favor his 1973 magnum opus, THE HOLY MOUNTAIN. Not us. No, for our twisted brand of outright fright fare, we must adhere to Jodorowski’s 1989 horrific head-trip SANTA SANGRE. This is movie is F*CKED UP! Boasting an unwavering NC-17 rating, SANTA SANGRE features every freaky location and vocation imaginable. We have a circus performer escaping a mental hospital, trying to track down his armless mother – herself a creepy religious cult leader – only to exact brutal murders on behalf of those very missing arms. It’s the craziest shite ever, can only be seen to be believed, and even then, you don’t want to overindulge on the killer Kush before doing so. Too, too much!

#4. ENTER THE VOID (2009)

Let’s be real, damn near every Gaspar Noe film is too much to handle while baked out of your gourd. IRREVERSIBLE counts, so does LOVE, but if we had to choose the single most intimidating anti-sobriety watch, it has to be the Argentinian’s 2009 purgatorial meditation ENTER THE VOID. The candy-colored allure is quite sensory-assaulting alone, so when you factor in the story of a drug dealer who in Tokyo who gets killed when a deal goes sour, things escalate in a quick hurry. Determined to stay on the Earthly plane, the man’s lost soul hovers over a gorgeously ambient cityscape, pouring over his life, the consequences of his death, and how best to avoid the ethereal in order to remain alive. It’s a hell of a trip!

#5. JACOB’S LADDER (1990)

Jesus Christ, from Eraserhead to F*cked-up Frog Face. No Bueno! Or what about those foul, slithery, lizard-like beasts groping the late great Elizabeth Pena? Yeah, either way you roll it up and smoke it, JACOB’S LADDER is one sadistic strain of psychological mind-fuckery. And worse, it pulls the damn bottom out with its “holy shit” final shot, boldly declaring that all we’d witnessed beforehand was merely a fractious figment of Jacob’s moribund, PTSD-ridden brain. It’s a masterstroke by Adrian Lyne, who keeps you so loopy and off-balance that you can’t feel the cumulative effect until the last 15 minutes or so. It’s a slow-creeper like that. So watching this film too stoned triggers a similar disjointed (get it) effect in your mind, making it almost impossible to not see yourself in Jacob.

#6. ERASERHEAD (1977)

Pick a Lynch film, any Lynch film. Okay maybe not THE STRAIGHT STORY, but damn near anything else. This man has made a living plumbing the inexplicably surreal on screen, so to our minds it only makes sense to go back to the very genesis. Lynch’s feature debut, ERASERHEAD, is about as bleakly nightmarish as humanly imaginable, the very kind of abject ugliness you desperately want to escape from when chilling out and passing the dutchie. Guess what though. We dare you to roast a full on Cheech & Chong session and watch this sucker from beginning to end. You’ll be a puddle of weepy tears by the time the credits roll. To this day, no one is sure how the baby was created in the film, and frankly, I don’t even want to know sober, never mind finding out with a Backwoods in tow!

#7. VIDEODROME (1983)

Pick a Cronenberg flick, any Cronenberg flick. Okay, maybe not COSMOPOLIS, but you know what I’m saying. Pretty much from day one, Cronenberg’s baleful brand of intense body-horror has left audience members’ brains in equally bloody stitches as his chewed up characters. THE FLY, EXISTENZ, NAKED LUNCH, all worthy candidates for too damn weird and wickedly wondrous to see while stoned, but all tallied, it has to be VIDEODROME that one-ups the rest. It’s just too damn hallucinatory. Worse than the onslaught of batshite imagery though, is the the theme of about TV and video broadcasts becoming the alternative to reality. Prescient much?

#8. BEGOTTEN (1990)

How many of you have seen BEGOTTEN? Yeah well, don’t! Don’t see it sober, and don’t you dare see it after a twisted doobie hits your lips. You might just pull a f*cking REEFER MADNESS and end up in a pysch ward. Seriously. You’ve been warned. Made in 1990, BEGOTTEN is a micro-budgeted indie experimental art film ($33,000) made by E. Elias Merhige, and more or less equates to a 70-minute long drug you regret taking as soon as it kicks in. The relentless visual bombardment of grotesquery, in black and white mind you, really does test your will as much as it tests your wits. Making it through the film is a chore by any standard, but sedatives and stimulants will surely make the nightmare all the more visceral. Remember DARE, kids? Heed wisely when approaching BEGOTTEN!

#9. ALTERED STATES (1980)

So what do you get when you mix a bowl of Ken Russel with a dose of Paddy Chayefsky? You reach ALTERED fucking STATES, that’s what! This movie deliberately induces in its viewer what the title suggests, as it follows Bill Hurt as a Harvard scientist who conducts a skein of experiments on himself using a hallucinatory narcotic and a sensory deprivation tank. Shite’s wild. The alarming visuals and wide range of intense moodswings are jarring on their own, but when you start to grapple with how these rifts in the brain chemistry begin to unravel Hurt’s genetic code, the abject terror will strike down twofold. Oh for Christ’s sake, just cop a peek at the photo above and tell me you’d want to tangle with that after puffin’ an eighth of dro!

#10. BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW (2010)

Let’s be clearheaded off rip, this is not a very good movie. However, for the illicit intents and purposes of this here list, BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW is indeed a brain-melting salvo you definitely do not want to see under the influence. Written and directed by Panos Cosmatos, son of George P., director of such genre gems as COBRA and LEVIATHAN, BLACK RAINBOW was entirely funded by the royalties of George P.’s TOMBSTONE in 1993. If that isn’t enough of a mind-f*ck, consider the premise. A woman wakes up under heavy medical sedation (hence the tripiness), only to summon the gumption to mount an escape from what turns out to be an institutionalized commune. Yeah, No!