Altered States (1980) on Netflix
R19801h 42mHorrorSci-FiThriller
Psychopathologist Eddie Jessup experiments on himself to reach states of mind beyond the ordinary. He starts with an isolation tank, then adds a potion gathered from a Mexican tribe.
- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb6.9/1043,058 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes87%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1967 Eddie Jessup, a psychopathologist who studies schizophrenia, starts experimenting with sensory deprivation in a flotation tank, with Arthur Rosenberg and Mason Parrish assisting. At a faculty party he meets Emily, and they marry. More than ten years on, Eddie holds a professorship at Harvard Medical School, and he and Emily, an academic in her own right, have two daughters; the marriage is close to ending. Hearing of the Hinchi people in Mexico, whose ceremonies produce shared hallucinations, Eddie travels there with his guide Eduardo Echeverria and drinks a potion made from the sacred mushroom and the shrub sinicuiche. He takes a sample of it home, keeps dosing himself, and returns to the tank. Arthur, Mason and Emily doubt his accounts of what the drug does, and they fear for him.
Cast
- Miguel Godreauas Primal Man
- Megan Jeffersas Grace Jessup
Show all 20 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Altered States (1980)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Paddy Chayefsky's novel and film were partly grounded in real science: the isolation-tank hallucinations came from John C. Lilly's actual sensory deprivation research, in which he studied altered consciousness in flotation tanks while under drugs like mescaline, ketamine, and LSD.
- Original director Arthur Penn quit the production during rehearsals after clashing with Chayefsky, and later said the only way he could leave and still get paid for his work was to arrange to be fired rather than resign outright.
- Writer Paddy Chayefsky was so unhappy with Ken Russell's direction that he pulled his name from the screenplay credit, using his real first and middle names, Sidney Aaron, instead.
- Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas said the clash over the film was so devastating for Chayefsky, who had spent decades fighting to protect his scripts from changes, that it was heartbreaking enough that some believe it contributed to his death not long afterward.
- The production's budget nearly doubled from its original plan, rising from a budgeted $9 million to $12.5 million and finally coming in at just under $15 million, with $4 million of that spent on special effects alone.
- For the Mexico sequences, the crew filmed on location in Creel, Chihuahua, and included real, unstaged footage of Tarahumara people actually gathering the psychotropic mushrooms depicted in the story.
