Altered States is a 1980 American experimental surrealist 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 features elements of both psychological horror and body horror.

Chayefsky withdrew from the project after disputes with Russell and took his name off the credits, substituting "Sidney Aaron", his actual first and middle names. The film stars William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban, and Charles Haid. It marked the film debut of Hurt and Drew Barrymore (in a small role). The film score was composed by John Corigliano and conducted by Christopher Keene.

Warner Bros. gave the film a limited theatrical release in the United States on December 25, 1980, followed by a wide release in February 1981. The film garnered generally positive reviews from critics, and was nominated for Best Original Score and Best Sound at the 53rd Academy Awards.

Plot

In 1967, Edward Jessup is a Columbia University psychopathologist studying schizophrenia. He thinks that "our other states of consciousness are as real as our waking states." He begins experimenting with sensory deprivation using a flotation tank, aided by like-minded researchers, Arthur Rosenberg and Mason Parrish. At a faculty party, he meets fellow "whiz kid" and his future wife, Emily.

Over a decade later, Edward is a tenured professor at Harvard Medical School. He and Emily have two daughters and are on the brink of divorce when they reunitefor the first time in seven yearswith the couple who had first introduced them. 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.

During the climb up into the Hinchi hill country (a plateau covered in spectacular mushroom-shaped ventifacts), Edward is told by his guide, Eduardo Echeverria, that the Hinchi use in their ceremonies a potion containing the sacred mushroom Amanita muscaria and the shrub sinicuiche, which they are collecting for next year's ceremonies. The tribe calls sinicuiche by a Hinchi name meaning "first/primordial flower" in recognition of the deep memory states which it can evoke. An indigenous elder ("the brujo") is seen with a root in his hand, which he asks Edward to hold, before cutting Edward's hand in order to add drops of blood to the mixture he is preparing. 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.

The following morning, Edward leaves the Hinchi plateau under a cloud, having killed, while in his intoxicated state, a large specimen of the Hinchi's sacred monitor lizard. He returns to the U.S. with a sample of the Hinchi potion for analysis by his colleagues and further self-experimentation and continues taking it in order to take his exploration of altered states of consciousness to a higher level.

When toxic concentrations of the substance make increased dosage dangerous, Edward returns to sensory deprivation, believing it will enhance the effects of the substance at his current dose. Repairing a disused tank, he uses it to experience a series of increasingly drastic visions, including one of early Hominidae. Monitored by his colleagues, Edward insists that his visions have "externalized". Emerging from the tank, his mouth bloody, frantically writing notes because he is unable to speak, he insists on being X-rayed before he "reconstitutes." A radiologist inspecting the X-rays says they belong to a gorilla.

In later experiments, Edward experiences actual, physical biological devolution. At one stage, he emerges from the isolation tank as a feral and curiously small-statured, light-skinned caveman, going on a rampage in town and breaking into a zoo before returning to his natural form. In the final experiment, he experiences a more profound regression, transforming into an amorphous mass of conscious, primordial matter. An energy wave released from the experiment stuns Edward's colleagues and destroys his tank. Emily recovers and finds a swirling maelstrom where the tank had been. 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 if this transformation reaches its conclusion.

His friends bring Edward home, hoping that the transformations will end. Watched over by Emily, Edward begins to regress uncontrollably, the transformations no longer requiring the intake of "first flower" or sensory deprivation. Urging Edward to fight the change, Emily grabs his hand, being enveloped by the primordial energy emanating from him. The sight of Emily apparently being consumed by the energy stirs the human consciousness in Edward's devolving form. He fights the transformation off by banging repeatedly into the hallway wall and returns to his human form. Edward then grabs Emily's form, and she returns to normal. The movie ends with the two on the floor in a nude embrace as Edward tells Emily that he loves her, which she had longed to hear him say.

Cast

Production

Development

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. They were feeling "disgruntled" and as a joke conceived a movie they could make together. They wanted to pitch something to Dino De Laurentiis, who was making King Kong. After discussing a version of Frankenstein they decided to do a version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Chayefsky went home and wrote a three-page "dramatic statement and I have never seen something come together so fast."

Chayefsky decided to write a serious film on the American scientific community and the archetypal man in his search for his true self. A producer at Columbia Pictures, Daniel Melnick, suggested that Chayefsky turn a treatment he had written into a novel first, and he agreed. He did extensive research with scientists and anthropologists.-->

In April 1978, Chayefsky turned in his script to Columbia. In June 1978, Melnick became the head of production at Columbia, but under his deal, he was still allowed to produce Altered States. Melnick wound up resigning in October, taking Altered States with him.

Production

For the final transformation sequence a computer-assisted rotoscope system was created, which produced smooth movements without jitter or objectionable outline. The glow and particles were made on a computer. The frames were first manually traced with an electronic pen and transferred to a tablet. For more complex scenes a high-resolution scanner was used. When finished, a digital plotter would draw the frames in black and white on frosted mylar animation cels. The cels were then photographed on a computer-controlled animation stand. An optical printer added the colors, requiring multiple passes with color filtration and separate mattes.

Casting

The film's original director was Arthur Penn. He cast the movie, including the relatively unknown leads William Hurt (in his first movie) and Blair Brown. At one point, Scott Glenn was a contender for the male lead. Another key role went to Bob Balaban. Miguel Godreau, a dancer and teacher with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, was cast as Jessup's caveman incarnation.

Change of director

Filming was to begin in November 1978. However, during rehearsals Penn resigned Penn later recalled that the only way he could leave the project and get paid for his work was to be fired. But he and Chayefsky remained friends thereafter.

The eventual director was Ken Russell, who had struggled to find feature film work since the box office failure of Valentino (1977).

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. Filming was then set to begin in March 1979 for Columbia with Howard Gottfried as producer. The film would eventually be done for Warner Bros, in part because the cost rose from an original budgeted $9 million to $12.5 million. It would eventually come in at just under $15 million, with $4 million of that going on special effects. Dick Smith worked on the groundbreaking special makeup effects, which made extensive use of his pioneering air bladder technique.

It was the first time Russell had made a film in Hollywood. He later said, "I thought I would hate Hollywood, but I rather liked it. 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."

Conflict between Russell and Chayefsky

There were three weeks of rehearsals in March 1979, during which Chayefsky and Russell had a massive dispute. The writer left the project and did not appear on set during filming, contrary to his normal practice.

Dave Itzkoff's book on Chayefsky, Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies, chronicles the making of Altered States and claims that Russell, objecting to Chayefsky's interference, had the writer banned from the set. Chayefsky reportedly tried to have Russell removed as director, but by then the film was already well under way, and the studio already had replaced one director (Penn). The film's producer, Howard Gottfried, told Chayefsky's biographer Shaun Considine that Russell was polite and deferential prior to production but after rehearsals began in 1979 "began to treat Paddy as a nonentity" and was "mean and sarcastic." Chayefsky called Russell a "duplicitous, mean man." "I couldn't work with someone else judging everything I did," said the director. "Chayefsky told me, 'I'll just be on the set as a benign influence.' The producer said, 'How do you spell benign, Paddy?' He answered, 'W-I-C-K-E-D'. He was joking but he wasn't joking." 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."

Chayefsky disavowal of film

Chayefsky later withdrew his name from the project, so the screenplay is credited to the pseudonymous Sidney Aaron. Film critic Janet Maslin, in her review of the film, thought it easy to guess why:

<blockquote>It's easy to guess why [screenwriter Chayefsky] and [director Ken Russell] didn't see eye to eye. The direction, without being mocking or campy, treats outlandish material so matter-of-factly that it often has a facetious ring. 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.</blockquote>

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."

Russell maintained that he changed almost nothing in Chayefsky's script. "We shot every word that Paddy wrote except for some trifling changes in the Mexican sequences," said Russell. "In fact, I was more faithful to the script in 'Altered States' than in any previous movie, and I think I did it great justice."

According to screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, Chayefsky had a clause in his contract stipulating that the words in the script could not be changed. Russell, "at the height of his alcoholism," was rebuffed when attempting to change the words, and then "began purposely trying to destroy Paddy's dialogue by having the actors eat while they were delivering it, or having them deliver it in a staccato, machine-gun kind of style, so that you couldn't make out what they were saying." 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. It was such a heartbreaking experience that he died shortly afterwards, some say from a broken heart."

Musical score

Russell discovered classical composer John Corigliano after going to one of his concerts. It was the composer's first time writing for a film (some of which would later be reused as Three Hallucinations).

Release

Altered States began a limited theatrical release in New York and Los Angeles, California, on December 25, 1980. It received a nationwide theatrical release in the United States in February 1981 by Warner Bros. against a production budget of $15million.

Critical response

The initial reviews were generally strong. "It's been a while since I've gotten the acclaim I've gotten on Altered States," said Russell.

John C. Lilly liked the film, and noted the following in an Omni magazine interview published in January 1983:

<blockquote>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. Watching him, I was frightened. I asked him later, "Where the hell were you?" He said, "I became a pre-hominid, and I was in a tree. A leopard was trying to get me. So I was trying to scare him away." The manuscript of The Scientist (1978) was in the hands of Bantam, the publishers. The head of Bantam called and said, "Paddy Chayefsky would like to read your manuscript. Will you give him your permission?" I said, "Only if he calls me and asks permission." He didn't call. But he probably read the manuscript.</blockquote>

Christopher John reviewed Altered States in Ares Magazine #6 and commented that "Simply put, Altered States is very good at what it proposes to do – luckily it proposed to do very little."

In Ready for My Close-Up!: Great Movie Speeches (2007), screenwriter Denny Martin Flinn called Chayefsky's screenplay "brilliant" and selected Emily's speech as "Chayefsky's last great take on life and love."

In 2023, Christian Zilko of IndieWire included the film in a list of "the 20 best body horror movies", and wrote that, "The film's psychedelic scenes are visual marvels in and of themselves, and a strong early career performance by William Hurt (in his first film role) ensures that Altered States is still highly watchable four decades after its release".

Accolades

The film was nominated for two Academy Awards:

  • Academy Award for Best Original Score – John Corigliano
  • Academy Award for Best Sound – Arthur Piantadosi, Les Fresholtz, Michael Minkler and Willie D. Burton

See also

  • Body horror
  • Genetic memory in fiction
  • List of films featuring hallucinogens

References

Bibliography

  • Altered States at The Criterion Collection