Have Your Say: What is Your Favorite "Altered State" Movie?

After last week's epic discussion on the future of movie watching, I figured it best to approach this week's HYS with something a little less... daunting. Kinda.

This past Saturday I unexpectedly found myself rewatching Ken Russell's Altered States for the fourth time. Despite any shortcomings the film may have (look up its troubled production history to get a taste of the root problems) I found myself falling back in love with Russell's wildly exciting ride through the very stuff of life and the cosmos. This got me thinking about the mutability of cinema and how it is a medium that easily attracts stories of transformation, great and small, of the mind, and of the body... and of the spirit.

So I present to you this week's topic and question: What is your favorite "altered state" movie? No doubt, there is an expansive selection of cinema to choose from. But for the sake of some rule/limit I am going to ask that it be a film directly about psychedelic induced trips, freak-outs or transformations of the reality within and/or around oneself. The films can treat this pretty literally like Russell does. So while 2001: A Space Odyssey features the granddaddy of all trip sequences, it is not induced by ingesting an ayahuasca or LSD type substance. And while Russell's film turns into something of a "monster movie", stuff like The Fly or The Wolfman feel off limits as well. That's for another week, yeah?

Okay. Get to knocking on those doors of perception and HAVE YOUR SAY!