10 Trippiest Horror Movies Of All Time
2. Beyond the Black Rainbow
Almost a full decade before he blew the world away with his transfixing acid-horror Mandy, Panos Cosmatos arrived on the scene with his self-funded debut Beyond the Black Rainbow - an at-times inscrutable but utterly trance-inducing psychedelic sci-fi horror.
A refreshingly experimental slap to the face for anyone over-gorged on junky horror offerings, what it lacks in overall clarity it more than compensates for with a near-suffocating level of dread-infused atmosphere.
Tough to describe and even tougher to make total sense of, Beyond the Black Rainbow is a cinematic abstraction but one that's difficult to look away from, so unnervingly beautiful is the production design and cinematography. It is a movie to turn on and simply soak in as slow, experiential cinema - it's not for those with short attention spans, but if you're willing to commit to spending 109 minutes inside Cosmatos' twisted mind, the unhinged rewards speak for themselves.
As the seed project for Mandy, an undeniably superior follow-up, Beyond the Black Rainbow marks the fascinating genesis of a true genre original.