The Holy Mountain

Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky

1973 / 114min / 35mm

Jodorowsky’s follow-up to his mother of all midnight movies, El Topo, is even wilder and more extravagantly imaginative that its predecessor, a surreal, sacrilegious allegory in which the writer-director stars as a mysterious figure called “The Alchemist” who, after recruiting a band of followers and subjecting them to a series of bizarre mystical rites, sets out on a journey to the titular mountain, on a mission to topple the gods who dwell there from their thrones. An existential epic on the Cecil B. DeMille scale for the psychedelic set, in which Jodorowsky is given free rein to realize his most fantastic imaginings.