El Topo

Alejandro Jodorowsky's symbol-drenched acid western, in which a black-clad gunslinger crosses a surreal desert on a violent spiritual quest, is the film that created the midnight-movie circuit in New York. It is grotesque, beautiful, blasphemous and completely uninterpretable, and audiences returned to it again and again to decode it.

Jodorowsky stars, directs and provides his own dense mythology. It launched the whole cult-repertory phenomenon and remains one of the strangest films ever to find an audience. Approach it as a ritual rather than a narrative.