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I Would Like to See It: Altered States
🕑 Added 2021-05-09 19:49:16 +0000 UTCOf their generation of horror filmmakers, it’s Cronenberg and Carpenter who are known for their practical effects, but with Altered States Ken Russell steps up effortlessly to rival either master. Dr. Edward Jessup’s (William Hurt) arm and torso ripple like jacuzzi water as his genetic memories bubble up within him. A vortex of mist swirls in a closed laboratory, shot through with flashes of pale light, and on the cross hangs a creature with the head of a fanged and many-eyed ram and the body of Christ in his final agonies. Altered States is so flurryingly dense with wild religious and psychedelic imagery that when the onslaught finally lets up the effect isn’t so much relief as foreboding, a sense that anything we cannot glimpse is hidden for a reason. Jessup’s spaced-out recounting of his trip back through time to the dawn of humanity, heard through a radio pickup inside his sealed sensory deprivation chamber, reads like the Monolith from 2001 suddenly whispering to the audience.
Even the film’s interiors are rendered magnificently odd and engrossing by Russell’s expert direction as his camera glides down concrete hallways and pulls back to encompass the disorderly sprawl of the Jessup home mid-social event, characters entering and exiting the shot like ants bustling through a cutaway view of their colony. The boiler room of the facility which houses Jessup’s laboratory is almost infernal, tarnished rivets sweating condensation as steam hisses and great twisted systems of piping vibrate and breathe. No moment of Altered States is composed without thought or devoid of something interesting to look at, and that its hallucinatory sequences still manage to rise above this uniformly high standard is astounding. Consider the red-washed glare of Edward’s visions of nuclear holocaust and the mad, stark blaze of enigmatic religious imagery so influential to everything from Neon Genesis Evangelion to HBO’s Carnivale.
The oddest sequence in Altered States, one in which Edward emerges from his sensory deprivation tank fully having genetically regressed into a primitive hominid, still manages to slide just under the wire of silliness. Its plethora of live animals — a snorting rhinoceros, a tiger lunging from the shadows, and finally the leaping, bleating mass of a herd of bighorn sheep surging over the rocks of their enclosure — form such a sensory assault that one can’t help but follow along, waiting for the next primal shock. That a man in search of ultimate truth is rewarded with the experience of beating a sheep to death with a rock and eating its raw flesh before passing out nude at the zoo is some lively tongue-in-cheek nihilism, and while the film’s final moments pull that punch, the journey there is well worth staring at in awe and terror.
