Altered States is a 1980 American science fiction horror film directed by Ken Russell, and adapted by playwright and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky from his 1978 novel of the same name.
The novel and the film are based in part on John C. Lilly's sensory deprivation research conducted in isolation tanks under the influence of psychoactive drugs like mescaline, ketamine, and LSD.
The film garnered generally positive reviews from critics, and was nominated for Best Original Score and Best Sound at the 53rd Academy Awards.
He begins experimenting with sensory deprivation using a flotation tank, aided by two like-minded researchers, Arthur Rosenberg and Mason Parrish.
When Edward hears about the Hinchi tribe, whose members experience shared hallucinatory states, he decides to travel to Mexico in order to participate in their ceremony.
Immediately after consuming the mixture, Edward experiences bizarre, intense hallucinations, including one of the petrifaction and subsequent erosion by blown sand of Emily and himself.
Repairing a disused tank in a medical school, Edward uses it to experience a series of increasingly drastic visions, including one of early Hominidae.
Emerging from the tank, his mouth bloody, frantically writing notes because he is unable to speak, Edward insists on being X-rayed before he "reconstitutes."
At one stage he emerges from the isolation tank as a feral and curiously small-statured, light-skinned caveman, going on a rampage through some streets in town and breaking into a zoo before returning to his natural form.
She searches in the vortex for Edward, finding him as he is on the brink of becoming a non-corporeal energy being that will vanish from reality altogether if this transformation reaches its conclusion.
Watched over by Emily, Edward begins to regress uncontrollably again, the transformations no longer requiring the intake of "first flower" or sensory deprivation.
The film had its origins with a meeting Paddy Chayefsky had with his friends Bob Fosse and Herb Gardner at the Russian Tea Room in 1975.
[10] For the final transformation sequence a computer-assisted rotoscope system was created, which produced smooth movements without jitter or objectionable outline.
[14] Miguel Godreau, a dancer and teacher with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, was cast as Jessup's caveman incarnation.
[18] The eventual director was Ken Russell, who had struggled to find feature film work since the box office failure of Valentino (1977).
"[19] Russell later said his agent told him directors who had turned down the project included Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Sydney Pollack, Robert Wise, and Orson Welles.
[24][25] Dick Smith worked on the groundbreaking special makeup effects, which made extensive use of his pioneering air bladder technique.
Everyone there is supposed to be terribly materialistic, but Altered States was the first movie I ever worked on where nobody—not Warner Bros., not Dan Melnick, the executive producer, or Howard Gottfried, the producer—ever mentioned money.
On-location filming locations included Harvard Medical School, Beacon Hill, Logan International Airport, Columbia University, the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, and the Bronx Zoo.
Additionally, scenes set in Mexico were filmed on location in Creel, Chihuahua, and included real-life footage of Tarahumara people collecting psychotropic mushrooms.
"[32] Russell added, "there is a great deal of dialogue in 'Altered States,' and as I saw it, my task was to make those scenes as visually interesting as possible so they wouldn't be swallowed up by the special effects.
The screenplay, on the other hand, cries out to be taken seriously, as it addresses, with no particular sagacity, the death of God and the origins of man.Film critic Richard Corliss attributed Chayefsky's disavowal of the film to distress over "the intensity of the performances and the headlong pace at which the actors read his dialogue.
Eszterhas considered the direction of Russell to have "destroyed" the script and film, which was ultimately "a critical and commercial failure [...] a heartbreaking experience for Chayefsky, who had fought for decades against that, and for protecting his material.
The website's consensus reads: "Extraordinarily daring for a Hollywood film, Altered States attacks the viewer with its inventive, aggressive mix of muddled sound effects and visual pyrotechnics.
It's an anthology and apotheosis of American pop movies: Frankenstein, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Nutty Professor, 2001, Alien, Love Story.
It moves with the loping energy of a crafty psychopath, or of film makers gripped with the potential of blowing the moviegoer's mind out through his eyes and ears.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Altered States.Corliss calls the film a "dazzling piece of science fiction"; he recognizes the film's dialogue as clearly Chayefsky's, with characters that are "endlessly reflective and articulate, spitting out litanies of adjectives, geysers of abstract nouns, chemical chains of relative clauses", dialogue that's a "welcome antidote to all those recent...movies in which brutal characters speak only words of one syllable and four letters.
"[34] But the film is ultimately Russell's, who inherited a "cast of unknowns" chosen by its original director and "gets an erotic, neurotic charge from the talking-heads scenes that recall Penn at his best.
"[34] Pauline Kael, on the other hand, wrote that the "grotesquely inspired" combination of "Russell, with his show-biz-Catholic glitz mysticism, and Chayefsky, with his show-biz-Jewish ponderousness" results in an "aggressively silly picture" that "isn't really enjoyable.
"[43] John C. Lilly liked the film, and noted the following in an Omni magazine interview published in January 1983: The scene in which the scientist becomes cosmic energy and his wife grabs him and brings him back to human form is straight out of my Dyadic Cyclone (1976) ... As for the scientist's regression into an ape-like being, the late Dr. Craig Enright, who started me on K (ketamine) while taking a trip with me here by the isolation tank, suddenly "became" a chimp, jumping up and down and hollering for twenty-five minutes.