In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based entirely on where my interests lead me.
Director Ken Russell wastes no time making a strong visual impression in Altered States: the first thing you see is an apparently disembodied head floating in a steamy glass container, like an updated version of Jan in the pan. The in-movie explanation is considerably less sinister: hotshot Columbia professor Eddie Jessup (William Hurt in his film debut; his character is partly based on that of John C. Lilly, inventor of the isolation tank) is just trying out the university’s sensory deprivation chamber for himself, after studying evidence gathered from student research subjects spending time in the same apparatus, and the severed head illusion rests on the fact that it’s a vertical rather than horizontal tank.
Jessup is a prototypical movie mad scientist, who begins by working on the kinds of projects recognizable to others in his field (his particular subject is schizophrenia) but thirsts after more fundamental types of knowledge than can be accommodated within the conventional academic world. His drive to understand states of human consciousness can’t be satisfied with what he’s learned from the sensory deprivation studies, so he seeks out a tribe of indigenous Mexicans called the Hinchi who use psychoactive mushrooms as part of their religious ceremonies. Hey, Carlos Casteñada was all the rage at the time and hadn’t yet been exposed as a faker.
The Hinchi allow Jessup to take part in their ceremony, but, predictably, he can’t handle it, which may be taken as a warning about encroaching on customs you don’t understand and/or trying to isolate induced experiences from their cultural context. Back home, he combines the drug with further time in the isolation tank, and his visions get stranger and more troubling. Even more disturbing, there seems to be more than just his consciousness at work, as X-rays indicate changes in his skeleton. And then things get really weird.
Like all good mad scientists, Jessup allows his work to take over his life, isolating him from his own family, in this case his wife Emily (Blair Brown) and two lovely children. By the way, she’s also name-checked as an academic hotshot, specifically an anthropology professor with a big-time career, but that side of her life is left undeveloped. Instead, her function in Altered States is mainly to prop up Hurt’s story, which requires her to embody in turn the two female roles allotted to women by men who don’t like to share: the Madonna and the whore.
Jessup and Emily meet cute at an academic gathering early in the film, and from the start she’s the sexual aggressor as well as the one who proposes they get married. Long after they break up, when he’s on the brink of turning into the Flying Dutchman and needs the pure love of a woman to redeem him, guess who comes running? (Never mind the young woman in his bed who refers to him as “Dr. Jessup” because that’s also academia, folks). And while Jessup is always going on about his work and his theories, she hardly has a chance to say anything about what she does, with fieldwork mainly coming up as an excuse for her to be running around in a pair of very short khaki shorts.
What many people seem to remember from their first viewing of Altered States is the visual effects by Bran Ferren, but to me they’re a decidedly mixed bag. The really good stuff is saved for the last 20 minutes, and those are worth waiting for, but a lot of what you see earlier is sort of OK but neither compelling or unprecedented. In fact, in my grumpier moods I think The Exorcist (1971) did it better, so the rather rudimentary nature of the representation of the inner contents of Jessup’s mind can’t be excused by pointing to the film’s 1980 release date. There’s some pretty silly live-action stuff, but maybe it was more impressive at the time of first release, especially if you were a bit underage to be seeing an R-rated film. Today Altered States is more like a time capsule for me, preserving social attitudes and story tropes as well as film techniques, and I’m glad there’s a good copy available in the Criterion Collection even if it wasn’t all that much fun to watch. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 1284
Technical details: 103 min.; color; screen ratio 1.85:1; English.
Edition reviewed: Blu-ray (1 disc).
Extras: commentary track by film historian Samm Deighan; 1980 interview of Ken Russell by Paul Ryan; 2009 interview of William Hurt by film historian Annette Insdorf; 2025 interview with special visual effect designer Bran Ferren; the film’s trailer. The Criterion website mentions an essay by film critic Jessica Kiang but it was missing from the library copy I viewed.
Fun Fact: Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who also wrote the source novel, had sufficient disagreements with Ken Russell’s interpretation of the material that he took his name off it. That is, he removed the name under which he is commonly known, “Paddy Chayefsky” (his nickname and real surname), and is credited as “Sidney Aaron” (his real first and middle name).
Parting Thought: Composer John Corigliano was recruited to write the music for Altered States by Ken Russell after the later heard some of his music in concert. Corigliano’s score (his first for a movie) goes a long way towards making this movie work, particularly in the transformation scenes, and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Score (he lost out to Michael Gore for his work on Fame). How often has a first-timer been honored with an Oscar nomination?
