[In honor of this weekend's extra sensory experience, BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW, Fango asked director of the excellent, trippy explorations of identity I CAN SEE YOU and THE VIEWER, and Glass Eye Pix sound design extraordinaire (you've heard his eerie work in the likes of THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, STAKE LAND and THE INNKEEPERS), Graham Reznick to give us his favorite pieces of mind bending cinematic psychedelia.]

This summer sees the release of several exciting science fiction films, some of which are steeped in the realm of the psychedelic (BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW) or the otherworldly unsettling (PROMETHEUS). In honor of the recent trend, here’s a look at five of my personal favorite reality bending, psychedelic, and incredibly terrifying science fiction films.

In no particular ranking order:

1) David Cronenberg's VIDEODROME (1993) / eXistenZ (1999)

Full disclosure:  I'm cheating a bit here.  This is two films, not one.

David Cronenberg is no stranger to brain-tweaking science fiction.  Some of his most well known films delve into the pulpier side (SCANNERS—which, for the hardcore sci-fi aficionados out there, is remarkably similar to the John Brunner book  THE WHOLE MAN and the Kafka-esque (THE FLY), but his greatest achievements in psychedelic, reality altering sci-fi would easily be the companion films VIDEODROME and eXistenZ.  They're not two films in a series, exactly, but two variations on a theme: the invasion of reality through mind altering media.  The idea that some overwhelming, evil "other" can insidiously infect our perception of reality itself is a powerful one, potentially even more frightening than a physical invasion.

While VIDEODROME is already in pretty much every psychedelic sci-fi film fan's library (or should be! There's even an awesome Criterion edition.), eXistenZ has become a bit of an underrated gem.  It arrived in 1999 when "virtual reality" still meant "big face goggles and chunky humanoids barely on the edge of the uncanny valley" and "virtual reality" was still an actual phrase people used.  Unlike previous virtual reality films (I'm looking at you, THE LAWNMOWER MAN!) its portrayal of the world inside a video game looked suspiciously like everyday reality, with real actors and real locations.  Suspiciously, being the key word.  In 1999, eXistenZ's representation of the quirks of video game existence and interaction seemed quaint and niche, but in 2012, with virtual personal assistants who can sing "Daisy, Daisy" on command and tend to repeat themselves every three answers, it feels closer and closer to the reality we currently inhabit.  Are we still in the game?

2) Andrei Tarkovsky's STALKER (1979) / SOLARIS (1972)

Okay, I'll admit it.  I just couldn't choose between which one of these two brilliant Tarkovsky films, STALKER and SOLARIS, to put on this list.  They're very different.  They deal with different themes, and have radically different aesthetics (Soviet Space Futurism and Soviet Nuclear Meltdown guilt).  But, I've always found it fascinating that Tarkovsky, a name not usually brought up as a "master of sci-fi," actually directed some of the greatest examples of the form.  So, two films for one entry, again.

STALKER seems like the slightly less accessible of the two, but it has one of the simplest and most powerful plots in all sci-fi.  Three men travel through The Zone (an area where the normal laws of reality no longer apply because, potentially, some sort of "alien" event has occurred), led by a Stalker (someone who can guide them), hoping to get to The Room, a sacred space at the heart of The Zone where your hopes and dreams can come true.  So they say.  And that's basically that.  The men walk slooowly through The Zone (which eerily resembles Chernobyl, years before the meltdown occurred) and they deal with strangely labyrinthine physics anomalies and near-magical events that cloud their minds.  While some modern directors have unfairly been accused of the "slow burn" approach (I'm looking at you, Mr. Ti West!), STALKER employs a nearly comatose pace.  That may sound like a criticism, but Tarkovsky’s precision, mastery, and conviction makes STALKER one of the most unbelievably tense and frightening movies I have ever seen.

SOLARIS, on the other hand… Well, I'll just say that if you've only seen the (admittedly pretty decent) 2002 Soderbergh remake, you owe it to yourself to see the original.  They share a story, but littleelse.  *Tone* is the key thing in Tarkovsky's version—we believe the psychological state of the main character so deeply that the film itself bends around his subjective interpretation of events.  And when the rug is pulled out in the supremely devastating final scene, we realize we always knew it was coming, but we were never willing to believe it would.

3) Rainer Werner Fassbinder's WORLD ON A WIRE (1973)

Here I go again, entry number three and I can't even stick to my own silly rules.

This one isn't a movie at all:  it's a T.V. miniseries in three one-hour parts.  It’s also recently received a fantastic release from Criterion (in HD, too). In WORLD ON A WIRE, the programmers of a virtual world see strange anomalies in their own reality that mirror anomalies in the world they created. While the plot twists of WOLRD ON A WIRE may come across as somewhat cliché, this is because in the years since 1973, the theme of "levels of reality" has been practically done to death in bigger budget action sci-fi (I'm looking at you, THE MATRIX!).  However, Fassbinder's sci-fi epic was prior to the rise of video games (or, any video games, really), and therefore pre-dates the entire set of visual and narrative shorthand that clouds many movies dealing with the subject (I'm still looking at you, THE MATRIX!).  And still, with its complex visual framing of actors within mazes of mirrors and glass, characters who vanish into thin air and out of existence, and menacing stalkers who look like lost members of Kraftwerk, it nails the creeping horror of a reality out of balance (in a way that closely resembles eXistenZ, another movie ahead of its time). Which makes WORLD ON A WIRE *doubly* ahead of its time.  I'm not even sure people in 1973 could watch this series without having nosebleeds.

4) Ken Russell and Paddy Chayefsky's ALTERED STATES (1980)

Oh, ALTERED STATES! The final word in science meeting mysticism on film.  And look!  One entry, one film!

A Harvard psychology professor (William Hurt) begins to experiment on himself, at first using sleep deprivation tanks and then moving on to the communal drugs of ancient cultures, in his hellbent quest to find the original "first thought" of our collective consciousness. Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for us, what he finds is that "inside" reality and "outside" reality are not separated by a wall as much as a weak psychological barrier, which, in his quest, he has gleefully trampled.  So influential and beloved is this film that FRINGE has recently utilized plot points, props (the sleep tank), and even a cast member (the wonderful Blair Brown, who, in ALTERED STATES, utters my all time favorite line in a movie, to William Hurt:  "Even sex is a mystical experience for you…  I feel like I’m being harpooned by some raging monk in the act of receiving God.").

Some of the effects have been accused of being cheesy or dated (I'm looking at you, monkey man scene), but in the context of Ken Russell's artistic palette of films, they're masterful and chilling psychedelic visuals which (along with the insanely terrifying score) are so effective in unmaking reality, stripping it all the way back to primordial ooze, you'll swear you've spent some quality time in the tank right there along with Hurt.

Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote the novel and the screenplay, had previously written NETWORK, one of the most prescient explorations of the existential crisis of the individual's place in a corrupted, corporate run society.  In ALTERED STATES, he explores the existential crisis of the individual's place in the mundane, agreed upon reality of everyday existence.  Unlike in the more cynical NETWORK, he offers a valid and moving solution in ALTERED STATES... and it's simpler than you might think.

5) Philip K. Dick's UBIK (1969) / UBIK: The Screenplay (1974)

And now, my final entry on this list of films, Philip K. Dick's 1969 novel "Ubik."  Books are movies, right?

There's a lot of great reality-altering science fiction out there, but Philip K. Dick pretty much takes the cake.  Someone once said Philip K. Dick would achieve naturally in a hundred years what L. Ron Hubbard spent millions of dollars trying to force.  He probably influenced very other entry on this list, directly or indirectly.  His work has been optioned and adapted more than most other authors (I'm not looking at you, Stephen King), probably because it's so cinematically viable—it's usually short, pulpy and funny, it's got mind-blowing hooks, and the thought-provoking core ideas are so strong that the plots of the movies can often be altered to suit whatever star needs a Super Cool sci-fi summer vehicle.  Which is the problem, really, because so much of what makes Philip K. Dick brilliant is not the thought provoking / mind-blowing hooks, but how his humble and tortured characters deal with their crisis.  But, this isn't a critique of what does and doesn't make a great PKD adaptation, this is about the only book of his he directly approached on cinematic terms: by re-writing it as a screenplay.

However, UBIK is not an easy book to describe in terms of movie log lines or one-line descriptions.  It's got telepaths.  It's got telepathic warfare.  It's got a "temporo-path" (a girl who can shift timelines around to suit her needs).  It's got a breakneck pace that hits the ground running on page one.  It's got some of the scariest weak-at-the-knees moments in any story (book, movie or otherwise).  And it's got the genius notion (and implementation) that reality-alteration itself can be harnessed and used like a weapon.  I really don't feel comfortable saying too much about the plot of UBIK— there are too many spoilers at stake—but if you're a fan of any of the other films on this list (or the like), you desperately need to read this book right away.  Philip K. Dick does not have any masterpieces (His oeuvre is like a steady stream of rapidly evolving obsessions; he doesn't settle on one idea long enough to perfect it.  And why bother?  He's got a million more, just as great. ), but if I had to point to one book that encapsulates all of what he does well and all of what he has influenced, UBIK would be the one.  A++++ WOULD BUY AGAIN.  And I have, like 14 times, because I keep lending the damn thing out and never getting it back.

A quick note about UBIK: The Screenplay, which was written in 1974 but not published until 1985, after Dick's death: if you can get your hands on a copy, it's worth reading, but only after reading the novel.  Dick's sense of screenwriting was blossoming but not refined. UBIK might have made a great film (and still might), but Dick’s screenplay is what seems like an intriguing first stab at the medium.

6) WOAH, SECRET ENTRY!  Jean Luc Godard's ALPHAVILLE (1965)

Oops, caught red handed.  I knew it wasn't going to be "five films" from the very start, but I did it anyway!  I guess some people just weren’t meant to play by the rules (I’m looking at you, me). 

The plot of ALPHAVILLE is, at first glance, fairly straightforward:  Lemmy Caution, secret agent, lands in the extra-planetary "Alphaville," a city whose inhabitants are brainwashed and controlled by a computer.  He must kill the bad guy, free the people, and escape with the girl.  Only, this is a semi-abstract French New Wave film, and it's shot in 1965 Paris with very little special effects. (Bonus Trivia:  Eddie Constantine, who plays Caution, has a cameo in WORLD ON A WIRE)

I was torn about putting ALPHAVILLE on this list because it doesn't deal directly with the "twist" of perception the way the others do, but eventually I realized that Godard's psychedelic new wave sci-fi neo-noir masterpiece perfectly achieves and embodies the common thread between most of the other entries.  Godard plays a beautiful trick on the viewer's perception of reality.  We are presented with a reality familiar to us (Paris), and all the rules of that reality are altered so subtly and carefully that we simply do not see it as the same reality we inhabit.  We fully believe the world of Alphaville as another planet.

What's particularly important is that this is achieved through narrative tricks and poetic cinematic expression, not CGI or other special effects.  There's nothing inherently wrong with a special effects extravaganza, as long as it knows what it's doing with its narrative, but it's exciting and refreshing to remember that it only takes a slight tweak to our fragile perception of reality to lead us into a completely unfamiliar world.

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MOVIES/TV - Fearful Features