This short film provides an inspiring look into the future, where humans visit other planets in the galaxy. The narration by Carl Sagan, philosophically explores our natural instinct to go far beyond our starting point.
The film is a vision of our humanity’s future expansion into the Solar System. Although admittedly speculative, the visuals in the film are all based on scientific ideas and concepts of what our future in space might be like, if it ever happens.
All the locations depicted in the film are recreations of actual places in the Solar System, built from real photos and map data where possible. – Erik Wernquist, Filmmaker
Fritz the Cat is a 1972 American animated comedy film written and directed by Ralph Bakshi, the film was the first animated feature film to receive an X rating in the United States.
It focuses on Fritz, an anthropomorphic feline in mid-1960s New York City who explores the ideals of hedonism and socio-political consciousness.
The film is a satire focusing on American college life of the era, race relations, the free love movement, and left and right-wing politics.
Pink Floyd The Wall is a 1982 British live-action/animated musical film directed by Alan Parker based on the 1979 Pink Floyd album, The Wall. The film is highly metaphorical and is rich in symbolic imagery and sound.
It features very little dialogue and is mainly driven by Pink Floyd’s music.
It depicts the construction and ultimate demolition of a metaphorical wall, alienation.
One of the best trippy movies ever.
Enter the Void is a 2009 French film written and directed by Gaspar Noé, labeled by Noé as a “psychedelic melodrama”.
The story is set in Tokyo and focuses on Oscar, a young American drug dealer who gets shot by the police, but continues to watch over his sister Linda and the events which follow during an out-of-body experience, floating above Tokyo’s streets.
Noé had tried various hallucinogens in his youth and used those experiences as inspiration for the visual style.
Including one drug experience where he traveled to the Peruvian jungle to try Ayahuasca. The experience was very intense and Noé regarded it “almost like professional research.”
This is purely a visual experience, don’t expect a great narrative – just trip out on the global neon candy-scapes.
Altered States is a 1980 American science fiction film adaptation of a novel written by playwright and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky. It was the only novel that he ever wrote, as well as his final film.
William Hurt plays Eddie Jessup, a scientist obsessed with discovering mankind’s true role in the universe. To this end, he submits himself to a series of mind-expanding experiments.
A dazzling film for its time.
A cult classic by any definition, Terry Gilliam’s epic sci-fi film is a true “dystopian satire“. Brazil challenges known societal constructs.
Focusing on “satirizing the bureaucratic, largely dysfunctional industrial world that had been driving Gilliam crazy all his life” as Jack Matthews puts it.
Visions of space and the future from Japanese culture in the 70s and 80s.
Kazuaki Iwasaki
One of our favorite sites, 50watts’ has a running feature where they showcase Japanese sci fi art scans from their ever-growing collections of books and catalogs on Japanese illustration and design.
We love looking through old book illustrations, and the sci-fi genre always is chalk-full of the most surreal, colorful, and bizarre. This is a fantastic collection of obscure artists and their fantastic imaginations that you would otherwise never see! – Juxtapose
Fear and Loathing has one of the best trip scenes of any drug involved movie. The entire movie is pretty much one long drug-fueled crazy adventure.
The film has become a true cult smash and is sampled over and over again in popular culture from music, to art to just about anywhere psychedelic drugs are involved.
A film that screams “product of its time,” The Holy Mountain was Alejandro Jodorowsky’s dizzying elegy to the sex, drugs and spiritual awakening of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
A Christ-like vagrant and thief wanders through a perverse and unfriendly land until he encounters an enlightened one, who gathers the thief and six of the world’s most powerful individuals for a spiritual pilgrimage. If you want to see the conquest of Mexico re-enacted by reptiles, soldiers shoot innocent people as birds fly from their wounds, and a wizard turn feces into gold, this is the movie for you.
The central members of the cast were said to have spent three months doing various spiritual exercises guided by Oscar Ichazo of the Arica Institute. The Arica training features Zen, Sufi and yoga exercises along with eclectic concepts drawn from the Kabbalah, the I Ching and the teachings of Gurdjieff.
After the training, the group lived for one month communally in Jodorowsky’s home before shooting began.
As far as trippy bizarre movies go – this takes the cake.
1940 – Over 7 decades ago, and still one of the top psychedelic animated films ever made. The third feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series, the film consists of eight animated segments set to pieces of classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski, seven of which are performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Fantasia and mind enhancing drugs go together like peanut butter and jelly. These days it is quite popular to discover what music synchs with Fantasia. Much like people do with Pink Floyds’ music synched to the Wizard Of Oz. Disney jumped on the 60’s hippy style and re-imaged the movie in the late 60s with a very different promotional poster, which includedmagic mushrooms.
Another music based film, Yellow Submarine is a 1968 British animated feature film based on the music of The Beatles. It is also the title for the soundtrack album to the feature film, released as part of The Beatles’ music catalog.
The film received a widely positive reception from critics and audiences alike. It is also credited with bringing more interest in animation as a serious art form.
The animation of Yellow Submarine has sometimes falsely been attributed to the famous psychedelic pop art artist of the era, Peter Max, but the film’s art director was Heinz Edelmann.
2001 contains one of the most memorable trippy scenes to ever hit cinema screens. Doubly impressive when considering it was made with 1968 technology.
As the film climaxes, the main character takes a trip through deep space that involves the innovative use of slit-scan photography to create the stunning visual effects. Known to staff as “Manhattan Project”, the shots of various nebula-like phenomena, including the expanding star field, were colored paints and chemicals swirling in a pool-like device known as a cloud tank, shot in slow-motion in a dark room.
From Rod Serling’s smoke-filled introductions, to the inevitable twist ending, the Twilight Zone is a classic series for stoners. Smoke a bowl and imagine watching these broadcasts in the 60s on an old black and white set, and you might just get a feel for how revolutionary the Twilight Zone was.
Five Characters In Search Of An Exit
Five people awake in a giant metal cylinder, none of them able to remember how they got there. A soldier, ballet dancer, hobo, bagpiper and clown. No, it’s not a weird predecessor to Cube, though it certainly seems like it.
The five are stuck in this room, with no exits whatsoever, occasionally blasted by a huge noise, an enormous clanging that shakes them to the core. They need no food, no water, and have no feelings at all. The soldier is determined to escape, even though the others are despondent. Creating a tower, one one top of the other, the army major escapes, tumbling into the light of day. Where a small girl picks up a doll in army uniform, puts it back in the barrel, and a lady rings a bell asking for donations for an orphans’ home.
The Eye of the Beholder
A lady is in hospital after massive facial surgery to try and make her look like everyone else. For most of the episode she’s bandaged up like a bondage mummy, and all the other people in the hospital’s faces are kept in the shadows.
The twist is that she’s beautiful, and everyone else is terrifying looking! And then she runs away to live on an island of ugly/beautiful people, and lives happily ever after.
The Invaders
The entire sketch is shot almost without dialogue, with the only speech occurring in the closing minutes. There’s an old lady who lives in a sparse and poor country cabin, who is encounters two tiny aliens and a flying saucer. She manages to kill one and chases the other back to his spaceship. Just as she attacks it with an axe, we hear the alien broadcasting in American-English, warning of a planet inhabited by giants, who would be very difficult to defeat. As the ship is smashed by the giantess, we see the writing on its side: U.S. Air Force Space Probe No. 1.
The Midnight Sun
The Earth is careening into the Sun, and the only two people left in an apartment building are Norma — a painter, and Mrs. Bronson — the landlady, everyone else has run for cooler climes. With looters roaming the streets, the power all but disconnected, water strictly rationed, and the heat ever increasing, the two ladies struggle with the mounting temperature.
Just as things get get unbearable, the scene shifts to the apartment at night time, now bitterly cold. The thermometer sits at -10°, and Norma is in bed, with a fever dream, imagining her impending fiery doom. The Earth is in fact hurtling away from the Sun, promising an icy death to all its inhabitants.
To Serve Man
Super smart aliens visit our planet, and fix everything. No more war, no more poverty, no more hunger. They just want what’s best for us! Government codebreakers frantically rush to translate a single piece of Kanamitian literature — a book called “To Serve Man”. Then, shock, horror! It’s a cookbook! They’re making us fat and complacent, and there’s nothing we can do now!
If you were cool enough to catch Danny Boyle’s Sunshine during its 2007 theatrical run, you were treated to a visually immersive film that brought you on board with a space crew chosen to save human existence by replenishing a dying sun. Supporting the eye opening cinematography was the beautiful soundtrack score by John Murphy that has been used in various films and shows like the Walking Dead.
The protagonists of Boyle’s films have included nihilist junkies (“Trainspotting”), enraged zombies (“28 Days Later”), neo-hippie backpackers (“The Beach”) and poverty defying children (“Slumdog Millionaire”). His genres have ranged from black comedy to apocalyptic horror to the metaphysical science fiction themes explored in Sunshine.
Sunshine Trailer – Directed by Danny Boyle
The principle of sensory stimulation is front and center in “Sunshine,” which depicts a manned mission to the Sun. A crew of scientists has been given the task of restarting the dying star by torpedoing it with a nuclear payload. The tone of the film is a throwback to 2001: A Space Odyssey and the premise seems to be lifted from the 1968 Pink Floyd title Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun. On a related note, Pink Floyd was originally asked to score the soundtrack for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Sunshine – The Surface of the Sun, Music Tribute
One constant in my film career is focus on sheer physical pleasure. I don’t want people to sit there and objectively watch the film. I want them to experience it as something that’s under their skin, so you try to make the films really tactile. – Danny Boyle
Sunshine – Captain Kaneda Meets the Sun
Danny Boyle his screenwriter, the novelist Alex Garland, who also wrote the script for “28 Days Later,” embraced the idea that “Sunshine,” precisely because of the vastness of its subject, would be a space odyssey in the most interior sense: a head trip. “It’s like films about mountains,” he said. “They’re not about mountaineering. They’re about the mind. Movies about space raise those questions of what we’re doing here, and that inevitably introduces a spiritual dimension.”
In science fiction, you need a great idea that lives in your mind and leads to characters and situations that inspire you. Here are five tips to help you generate science fiction plot ideas for your next script or book.
Look at the Big Unanswered Questions
Like, did aliens spread magic mushrooms across the universe to monitor signs of life? And what’ll happen at the end of the universe? And so on. The bigger and more insoluble the question, the less likely it is your answer will be disproved next week. Once you come up with your own weird explanation for a big cosmic riddle, then you can work backwards from that to create a story around it .
Add Philosophy to the Mix
As Arthur C. Clarke would tell us, science fiction has the ability to get really cosmic and massive in its explorations of the big questions. Who are we, where do we come from, who created us, and so on. A lot of philosophers are moving into territory formerly occupied by physics, because physics is dealing with the big existential questions. You, too, can leave behind “hard” science and get into the big questions about meaning — and the result might actually be purer science fiction than if you just stuck to the actual science questions.
Project Today’s Problems into the Future
There are things that we all sort of know, but we don’t really grasp them because they’re too huge and unthinkable. Science fiction, in particular, has a lot of ways to talk about uncomfortable, weird facts without getting preachy or sledgehammery, by changing the setting or scale. You can make people identify with someone who’s smack in the middle of future water wars, and drive home the likelihood of water shortages without ever lecturing.
Imagine the Consequences of a New Scientific or Technological Discovery
Try to imagine how a brand new science could wreck the lives of people in the future. It’s always more interesting to see people struggling with new technology than to watch them just do the happy “yay new technology” dance. Think of all the possible ripple effects from a new miracle technology — and then pick one of the least obvious to build your story around. The short film Sight explores privacy issues that arise with technology similar to Google Glass.
Give Truth to False Beliefs
We all have beliefs we’ve discarded over the years. Everything from “Santa Claus is real” to “authority figures are always right”. Pick a belief you used to hold, that’s been disproven by events or that you’ve outgrown for some reason and try to imagine a universe where that belief is true. Take all of the energy of your former belief, plus the distance that comes from your change of heart, and try to create a story around that.