Column Science Fiction Film Club Altered States: Bad Trips, Dodgy Science, and the Untapped Depths of the Human Mind Ken Russell, an isolation tank, and some powerful hallucinogens—what could go wrong? By Kali Wallace | Published on May 13, 2026 Credit: Howard Gottfried/Warner Bros. Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Howard Gottfried/Warner Bros. Altered States (1980) Directed by Ken Russell. Written by Paddy Chayefsky (under the pseudonym Sidney Aaron). Starring William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban, and Charles Haid. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve written about a movie inspired by research conducted in the 1950s at the National Institute of Mental Health, I would have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it is strange that it’s happened twice. Twice so far, that is. There may well be more NIMH-inspired films out there. Back in the mid-’50s, right around the time John B. Calhoun was starting to use rats as a way of studying population dynamics in research that would later inspire the children’s book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and subsequent Don Bluth film The Secret of NIMH (1982), another NIMH researcher was embarking on a very different sort of study that would go on to inspire a very different sort of movie. That other researcher was physician and neuroscientist John C. Lilly. If you’re thinking, “Haven’t I heard that name somewhere?” let me clear it up for you: He was the guy who gave dolphins LSD and spent years trying to prove they could learn to talk to us. As part of that research, Lilly arranged for volunteer Margaret Howe Lovatt to live in complete isolation with a bottlenose dolphin for two and a half months, an experience which is infamous in history and pop culture for other reasons. (I spent like five minutes trying to figure out if that link, which is to an article in The Atlantic, needs a content warning. Note to editor: Is this the kind of website where mainstream news articles about sexual encounters between humans and dolphins require warnings? Well, consider this a heads up, at least.) Before he became interested in dolphins, however, Lilly spent some time doing research at NIMH, looking for a way to isolate the human brain from external stimuli. What he came up with was the first isolation tank; he used himself as one of the early experimental subjects. Lilly was one of the many neuroscience researchers in the early ’60s who discovered the joys of psychoactive drugs (although he was perhaps the only one who gave psychoactive drugs to dolphins). Lilly would spend the rest of his life and career exploring the sort of metaphysical, spiritual, and pharmaceutical experiences that lead to people making sweeping claims about expanding their consciousness and reaching higher levels of awareness and all that stuff. Among Lilly’s drug-taking research counterparts in the counterculture heyday of the ’60s and ’70s was Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who pioneered research into the therapeutic uses of psilocybin mushrooms. Leary became interested in mushrooms after using them during a trip to Mexico in 1960. When he returned to Harvard, he and his colleague Richard Alpert began a series of experiments into the effects of psilocybin mushrooms, using themselves, their grad students, divinity students, and prisoners as experimental subjects. Their psilocybin research at Harvard was eventually shut down after a series of controversies. The exact reasons depend on who you ask, but seemed to have included genuine concerns about shoddy research design, lack of precautions, and inappropriately pressuring students into study participation, as well as the broader political panic about drug usage that would eventually lead to psilocybin being made illegal in the U.S. with the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 and the start of the catastrophically ill-conceived War on Drugs. (The tide has shifted and the trend in many places is now toward decriminalizing psilocybin, in large part because of its therapeutic uses.) Fast-forward a few years to the mid ’70s. Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who had just finished working on Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976), was looking around for a new movie idea. Network was a bleak satire about the deteriorating mental health of a television news anchor; it was also an unqualified success both commercially and critically and would earn Chayefsky his third Academy Award. While contemplating ideas for his next screenplay, Chayefsky became interested in the work of those controversial psychanalysts and researchers of the ’60s and ’70s, and that’s how Altered States was born. Chayefsky wrote up a treatment, then turned that treatment into a novel. The book version of Altered States was published in 1978, but it was always intended to be a precursor to the screenplay. I haven’t read the book; chime in below if you have! Chayefsky had long maintained an unusual amount of creative control for a screenwriter, which came to include agreements in which the director would not be permitted to change any of the dialogue and Chayefsky would be present on set during filming. That was the arrangement during the production of Network, and it seems to have worked, as Chayefsky and director Sidney Lumet were good friends who collaborated well. The same would not be true of Altered States. Lumet was the first director considered for Altered States, but he passed to work on something else.The first director brought on for the film was Arthur Penn, who is primarily known for Bonnie and Clyde (1967), one of the first films of the sexier, grittier, more violent, post-studio New Hollywood era. Penn was the one who cast then-unknown actor William Hurt in the lead role. But disagreements with Chayefsky led to him leaving the film. About the disagreements Penn said, “It was fine with me that Paddy had approval over the script and any changes, but for him to veto what I was doing, or to intervene in areas where he wasn’t knowledgeable or even competent, was wrong. Set and camera angles, my ass…” Penn’s annoyance was a harbinger of things to come. It’s not entirely clear how many directors were approached to take over, but it sounds like Chayefsky and producer Howard Gottfried talked to everybody and their brother about the film. Gottfried finally suggested Ken Russell, a controversial and eclectic British director known for the critically acclaimed D.H. Lawrence adaptation Women in Love (1969), the censored and banned NC-17 religious thriller The Devils (1971), and the musical Tommy (1975), based on The Who’s rock opera album of the same name. Russell had never worked in Hollywood before, but on paper he wasn’t a bad choice for a film that would feature surreal, psychedelic sequences in between long sections of heady academia-speak. However, it quickly became apparent that he and Chayefsky were not going to get along. They were at each other’s throats before the film even moved out of rehearsals, and maybe even from their very first meeting. Apparently Russell called his wife immediately after the introduction and said, “I can’t work with this man. He’s a complete egomaniac.” To which she replied: “Then you should get on just fine.” To put it bluntly, they hated each other. Chayefsky’s friends tended to blame Russell entirely for the strife on set—especially after Chayefsky’ death in 1981—but word from people on the production was more mixed. Russell claimed Chayefsky was unbearably nitpicky and meddlesome: “He didn’t like the colour of the paint on the isolation tank. Then it went on to other things. He didn’t like the lighting, then he didn’t like the machinery, then he thought I was making the actors appear drunk in a scene where they were written to be slightly tipsy in a bar.” Honestly, it sounds like they were both difficult to work with, leading to one of those classic Hollywood feuds in which big egos clash, making it everybody else’s problem. Chayefsky, who was in failing health at the time, was soon fed up. After Russell banned him from the set, he tried to get the studio to bring on another director. But the studio wasn’t about to go through that search again (possibly because dozens of directors had already said no), so Chayefsky left the production and disavowed the film. That’s why the film credits the screenplay to “Sidney Aaron,” which is Chayefsky’s first and middle name. In early 1981, shortly after the film came out, Chayefsky said, “I haven’t seen the picture and I intend to go on not seeing the picture so that when people ask me what I think about it I can tell them I haven’t seen it.” It was the last film he wrote. He died later that year. All of that drama for a film about a guy who takes so many drugs he regresses into an ape. Because that’s the plot of the movie. We’re all clear on that, yeah? I could go through a whole plot summary, but it’s really very straightforward. There under all the academic patter about human consciousness and esoteric scientific jargon and ’70s name-dropping and images of crucified seven-eyed Jesus goats, this is a movie about a man who takes so many drugs he regresses into an ape, then runs around Boston naked while being chased by wild dogs (because apparently in the ’70s Boston had roving packs of wild dogs). The guy is Eddie Jessup (William Hurt), who is basically a combination of Timothy Leary and John C. Lilly. (Leary and some of his contemporaries are mentioned by name in the movie by one of Jessup’s colleagues; I didn’t catch whether Lilly was explicitly mentioned.) Eddie wants to expand his consciousness and discover his true self, whatever that means, so he uses sensory deprivation tanks and psychoactive mushrooms to experiment on himself, much to the consternation of his wife, Emily (Blair Brown), and his colleagues Arthur and Mason (played by Bob Balaban and Charles Haid). Two cast-related fun facts: 1) Brown would later play another sensory deprivation tank-adjacent sci fi role in the excellent TV show Fringe. 2) One of the Jessup’s young children, who appears only briefly, is played by Drew Barrymore in her film debut. Chayefsky spent a lot of time studying the people conducting this sort of research in the ’60s and ’70s, and it shows. The wordy, jargon-filled script does a fantastic job both capturing and lightly skewering the intense, self-important way academics too deep in their own studies talk. This is most apparent in the fact that Eddie Jessup is a complete jackass. He’s so annoying. He’s wallowing in hubris and intellectual superiority. Imagine being stuck at a party with that guy! If you’ve been to grad school, you already know what it’s like. He turns every single conversation topic back to his own research, and his research is getting high to prove he experiences a more authentic world than everybody around him. When Emily says she loves him, he responds by talking about his research. When his experience with the ritual in Mexico doesn’t grant him the life-altering revelation he’s hoping for, he throws a tantrum and blames the Indigenous people who invited him to participate. He is constantly talking to the people around him, but he never listens to anything they say. He sleeps with his students. He’s insufferable—which makes him a great character. Because he’s making all these scientifically unsound, medically unwise, and ethically questionable decisions in his purported search for the origin of human consciousness, and we want to see where it leads. His first experiences are confined to his mind, as he sees himself observing then becoming part of a primordial hominid hunt in a sort of genetic memory. Over time, those experiences begin to manifest outwardly in changes to his body and behavior even when he’s not drugged up in the isolation tank. That’s what leads to Eddie’s experiments bursting out into the real world, as he spends one wild night as an ape-man terrorizing security guards, zoo animals, and the aforementioned wild dogs of Boston. (That’s not William Hurt’s naked ass under the hairy ape makeup, incidentally. Primordial Ape Eddie is played by dancer Miguel Godreau.) How interesting one finds Altered States is, I think, somewhat dependent on one’s tolerance for engaging with the imagery of drug-induced hallucinations and the quasi-profundity of an earnest search for depth and meaning in what they offer. Those images are one element Russell and Chayefsky argued about, as Russell didn’t think it was possible to portray the nebulous, intangible things Chayefsky had written. So he went with the seven-eyed Jesus goat instead—which is, to be fair, a great image. Even so, it’s almost a relief the first time Eddie comes out of the tank with blood on his face, because it signals film is breaking out of the hallucinogenic realm and into something more tangible. The inside of one man’s mind can only carry us so far; when it turns into blood and body horror we can go a bit farther. In a 2025 essay for the Criterion Collection, film critic Jessica Kiang describes Altered States as “a dippy, delirious Rube Goldberg machine” and goes on to state the film “walks a tightrope between pretentious self-seriousness and outrageous flippancy,” two descriptions that I think are absolutely spot-in. It’s both heavily serious and completely batshit. Chayefsky and Russell may have been egomaniacs who hated each other’s guts, but the combination of the latter’s script with the former’s visual style is really something to behold. I don’t quite agree with Kiang that Altered States is “tremendously exciting” to watch, but I think it’s visually striking and charmingly weird. I also think the delirium is sometimes a bit too dippy, and the “man learns to say ‘I love you’” ending a bit too clean. (It doesn’t help that characters devolving into more primordial forms always makes me think of Star Trek: Voyager’s“Threshold” and, well, once you start thinking about “Threshold” you can’t take anything seriously.) Watching a character go to such extremes to find something he can’t even seem to articulate is interesting, but in the end, I find myself agreeing with what Emily says early on in her relationship with Eddie: “You’d sell your soul to find the great truth. Well, human life doesn’t have great truths.” It does, however, have weird movies for us to enjoy, and that’s good enough for me. What do you think of Altered States? What do you think about its version of exploring the power of human consciousness? Were there really packs of wild dogs roaming Boston in the ’70s? Next week: We’re shifting our mental gears from consciousness-expanding pharmaceuticals to mind-controlling hypnotism with Robert Wiene’s Expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It’s over a hundred years old and in the public domain in the U.S. so you can find it online in many places, including numerous uploads on YouTube and the Internet Archive.[end-mark] The post <i>Altered States</i>: Bad Trips, Dodgy Science, and the Untapped Depths of the Human Mind appeared first on Reactor.