Acid & psychedelic

Films built around drugs and the counterculture, split, like most exploitation, between the ones warning you and the ones inviting you in.

The panic films

Exploitation's oldest move, updated for LSD. The Trip (1967, Corman, written by Jack Nicholson) stages an acid experience with every optical effect available. Wild in the Streets (1968) imagines a rock star elected president who puts everyone over thirty in LSD camps. Blue Sunshine (1977) has a batch of ten-year-old acid making people murderous and bald. The drug-scare tradition runs from Reefer Madness straight through here.

The head films

Made to be watched altered, these abandon narrative for sensation. The endpoint is the acid western: Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo (1970), a violent, symbol-drenched mystical western that essentially created the midnight-movie circuit, and its stranger successors.

Why it is its own tag

The psychedelic film sits at the exact point where exploitation met the counterculture and could not decide whether to sell it or condemn it, so it did both, often in the same movie.

Where to start

The Trip for the panic, El Topo for the trip.