Nutty Professors: Altered States (1980) and Re-Animator (1985)

Episode Transcript
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(01:00):
Dear listeners and welcome to SciFrights, the film discussion podcast from the Interzone
where horror meets science fiction. My name is Liam Dunn and I am a screenwriter, film critic
and lifelong science fiction fan. My name is Dr Lindsay Hallam and I am a senior lecturer in film
at the University of East London who specialises in horror cinema. And we are in fact partners
both in life and in crime and we're die-hard film fanatics. We even make films together sometimes

(01:25):
and most recently we made the film They Called Me David, a sci-fi horror short made on Super 8
that premiered at Frightfest in 2021 and has played in genre festivals around the world.
Now what is Sci-Frights I hear you ask? Well in this podcast we will present a season of episodes
based around a specific theme and then discuss how horror and sci-fi are in conversation or in

(01:45):
some cases opposition to each other as they approach this theme from the unique perspectives of their
genre. In each episode we will explore this theme through two films, one horror and one sci-fi
and discuss the place of the film within the history of the genre, the way the film
employs genre tropes and style and analyse the film's historical context and social commentary.
So I guess maybe we could we're in episode two now, maybe we could just talk a bit more about how

(02:11):
this idea came up. So for me I think the fact that we are a couple is kind of central to how we
came up with this. Yeah and I think because we would sit around a lot and just talk about films
and the ones that we love and things like that and like all people who do that, we realised hey well
let's do a podcast. Yeah yeah and a lot of it I think also comes from the fact that we often

(02:36):
while we always kind of watch movies together and it is often the case that I will have a horror
film that I want to watch and you'll have some science fiction film or TV show that you want to
watch and so it often is a case of if you if you watch mine I'll watch yours type of thing.
Yeah quid pro quo. Yeah so and so we just came up with this idea that given that I love horror

(03:03):
you love sci-fi let's kind of bring them together. Yeah and I think also a realisation that
they're different genres that sometimes intersect you know you can get a horror sci-fi
all of those things are happening but I think also we realise that they
tackle the same subject matter all the time and I think it was an interesting idea that we could

(03:25):
look at themes and ideas that are explored in both a horror context and a sci-fi context and see how
they interact with each other or yeah or in opposition to each other and we just thought that
would be an interesting way to do it because yeah we both love the genre the genres and
like we just give it a go give it a crack. Yeah and also in my job at the University of East London

(03:47):
I am very lucky to have a module called Horror and Science Fiction so I also have tons of research
and lectures and things that I've given on the subject or the subjects over the years so I thought
I'd kind of bring that into it as well hopefully we can have a good mix of some academic stuff with

(04:08):
but don't go too far into that so you can always pull me up when I if I start talking about Deleuze
or something a bit too much for what most people want to hear about. Yeah when I start not when I
don't understand what you're talking about. Yeah you can let me know. Yeah and so that's the idea
for the podcast but then about when we wanted to do what we were going to do for our first one and

(04:31):
we thought we'd do this season about sort of influences of Frankenstein because
we think that that's where it all began really isn't it? Yeah. That would be the best jumping
off point for us. Definitely, again going back to that module that I teach I say to my students
that both genres were born from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and so that's kind of where we

(04:55):
thought we could begin with this season. The first episode we did very directly looked at
Frankenstein and its influences and people films that were inspired by that and now I think
we're going to go off onto slightly into slightly different territory with the next the films in
this episode and in future episodes but I think it all comes back to Frankenstein I think we've

(05:18):
we've got to thematically link it in even if we don't talk about Frankenstein a lot going forward
I think it's all going to link in quite nicely. It's almost inevitable when you talk about horror
or science fiction films it often always seems to come back to Frankenstein there are elements
that are in that novel that just almost seem to just permeate everything throughout both the genres.

(05:42):
Yeah I think I've mentioned before as well that I think everybody is just has it in their DNA
that even if you don't know the story directly you know the elements and I think and it comes
out whether people in films and books and TV and whatever without people consciously realising
it probably. Alright so let's get into episode two. Episode two this is where we're going to

(06:05):
explore the elite company of Dr Frankenstein and others who share his legacy as we dive into the
enigmatic world of the mad scientist. Lindsay what films are we looking at? So we're looking at Ken
Russell's psychedelic thriller Altered States and Stuart Gordon's Lovecraftian Gorefest Reanimator.
And just a reminder to everyone out there in podcast land we are going to spoil the hell out

(06:27):
of these films so if you want to watch them before you listen to us talk about them go right
ahead and do that and come back we'll be waiting. So without further ado welcome to episode two of
the Sci-Frights podcast so today we're looking at Nutty Professors.

(06:55):
So in our first episode I talked about Frankenstein and where that novel came from but also how
almost from the beginnings of cinema you had adaptations of Frankenstein dating back as far
as 1908 and considering that cinema began in 1895 it wasn't long before there was adaptations

(07:19):
of Frankenstein. There was also an adaptation of the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
in 1913 so that was actually a short version. And so with Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde we have
this doctor or person doing experiments and it's kind of giving rise to this common

(07:41):
character type of the mad scientist. And you have the mad scientist really coming to the fore in
the German Expressionist period in the 1920s and horror and science fiction as we know them as
cinematic genres also kind of come from German expressionism. So you have a mad scientist in

(08:03):
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari who is this kind of evil doctor who is using his powers to manipulate
and control someone who goes out and kind of does his bidding. Also in 1927 you have Fritz
Lang's Metropolis and in that you've got Dr Rotwang who creates a automaton, a robot. And what's

(08:29):
also really interesting about Dr Rotwang is that in the production design as he kind of unveils Maria
so he has this what we now kind of consider a very stereotypical lab but on the wall behind Maria as
she stands up you see a pentagram an upside down pentagram. So I think there is almost this

(08:51):
connection already between kind of mad science and almost like this idea of kind of black art.
The occult. The dark arts yes, yeah. Which I think certainly you were in in our first film today.
We're kind of seeing some of the same roots of that. Also in German expressionist period you
have The Hands of Orlack from 1924 and then the first Hollywood horror films. Of course you have

(09:16):
Frankenstein directed by James Whale in 1931. The universal as part of the universal the first
horror films. Bride of Frankenstein in 1935. James Whale also directs The Invisible Man in 1933. So
you have his kind of experimenting on himself that kind of Jekyll and Hyde aspect of it.
And there's also Mad Love which was directed by Karl Freund who started as a cinematographer in the

(09:40):
German expressionist period and he moved to America. Also in 1932 you have Island of Lost Souls which
is an adaptation of the Island of Dr. Moreau the novel by H.D. Wells. So again you have yeah I think
Victor Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde and the Island of Dr. Moreau. These literary works that

(10:00):
are being adapted to cinema. What's central to a lot of these mad science films is what you could
possibly say is quite a conservative message in that they are talking, they are kind of presenting
these mad scientists as dabbling almost in God's domain and that that is being presented as a bad

(10:24):
thing. That there are things that man is not meant to know. There's this book on horror cinema by
James Marriott and Kim Newman and they talk about the mad scientist that the figure is essentially
conservative drawing on a Puritan distrust of prideful knowledge that still feeds a current
of anti-intellectualism. So this idea is that these mad science tales are cautionary tales.

(10:48):
It's a warning humanity that there are things that we shouldn't know that we shouldn't know
that we shouldn't know that we shouldn't challenge God's domain and that leads to kind of certain
death and destruction. So it's this whole idea of information is dangerous and you can relate that
back to Prometheus. The whole idea of knowledge brings punishment and of course that was about

(11:10):
almost the idea of defying the gods. That was banging up against the shift that came with the
enlightenment of that we were starting to seek knowledge from science and nature rather than
from God and that you could say that there is maybe this conservative thing of like it's showing

(11:30):
that to turn away from God towards science is a bad thing. So you definitely could see that
there maybe is this quite conservative message perhaps inherent in this story and certainly
I think when you look at the older films, I think just older horror and maybe also

(11:52):
science fiction films in general, they often do work on this idea that there is this some kind
of aberration that comes into being in this monstrous inhuman form and the whole idea of
the story is that you've got to destroy them, destroy the monster, expel them and then natural

(12:13):
order is restored. And so a lot of older films do follow that kind of it's almost like it's a closed
kind of circle at the end that you start with everything, you know, natural order is in place,
there's disruption or aberration, you expel that and the order comes back, order is restored.

(12:34):
But I think as you get into certainly as you get into the 1960s, that that doesn't exist anymore.
You have a lot more kind of open endings. Also, you have a lot of sequels and things.
But but I think definitely I think the whole shift, the generational shift that comes with the 1960s
really changes probably both genres away from that just idea of expelling the monster and that,

(13:02):
you know, there is maybe much more kind of sympathy for the monster or for the other
that comes with later films. And so you also have the idea that mad science films are kind of linking
to cultural events and fears. So yeah, Frankenstein was written at a time when modes of thought were
changing, and people were looking to science rather than religion for life's answers.

(13:25):
And then once you kind of come out of World War II, there's a lot of mad science films
that start to reference I think the Nazi experiments, the figure of Dr. Mengele.
And also in the 1950s, you have all the nuclear threats and you have a lot of mad scientists
using radiation and playing with our the fears at the time of the Cold War of possible nuclear

(13:49):
annihilation that are, you know, the whole thing, these were things were created by scientists.
Scientists created the means to destroy us all. Should we should we trust them? And also as you
get along, I can think also like one of our future episodes, we're going to talk kind of about
diabolical surgery. We all want to kind of stop the aging process and kind of defy death. There's

(14:15):
the growing trends of plastic surgery. But then also you have all that work being done now with
genetics, which we talked about in our last episode with the when we looked at Splice. So you can kind
of see this whole idea of mad science always kind of changing with the times and reflecting our kind
of cultural fears and anxieties. But I think also our curiosities as well. I think this is probably

(14:42):
a good point for us to start talking about Altered States. In the basement of one of the country's
leading medical schools, Dr. Edward Jessup, candidate for a Nobel Prize, is conducting the most
dangerous experiment in the history of science. And the subject of the experiment is himself.

(15:06):
Ask him what kind of an experience I can expect.
It's deafening, the noise is deafening. It's blacked out. What happens during these blackout

(15:37):
periods is you get the feeling of phenomenal acceleration like you're being shot out over
millions, billions of years. Time simply obliterates. You guys are shooting up with an
untested drug that stacks up in the brain and works in the nucleus of the cell and you don't call that
dangerous. I'm asking you to put the experiment off until we understand a little more in order to
minimize the risk. I'm really frightened. We could be screwing around with this whole genetic

(16:02):
structure now. How do we stop this? We've got millions of years stored away in that computer
bank we call our minds. We have got trillions of dormant genes in us. Our whole evolutionary path,
perhaps I've tapped into that. He may be on to something that is beyond our own comprehension
now because I believe in, I want this thing stop. The hell was that? You okay? If you love me,

(16:27):
if you love me, Ernie, get fired!
Ernie!
Altered States. Altered States is a Hollywood film that was released in 1980, directed by the

(16:48):
extremely boring Ken Russell, written by the wildly experimental Paddy Chayevsky,
who's always up for a bit of random Tomfoolery, which I'll get to later, and starring William
Hurt in, I think, what was his first film role? Yes, it is. And Blair Brown, Bob Balaban,

(17:11):
Hollywood super hunk Bob Balaban, and Drew Barrymore shows up as their kid,
as her first role as well. And Altered States follows William Hurt's character,
Edward Jessup, who is a professor at, I believe, Harvard University, who's experimenting with
schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. And what is, and he's using sensory deprivation

(17:33):
technology and techniques in order to unlock the potential of the human mind and to delve into
the subconscious. And he wants to keep pushing forward with his experiments and he meets Emily,
played by Blair Brown, then they become romantically entangled and get married.
She's an anthropologist herself. She's deeply in love with him, but he's very cold and

(17:55):
standoffish with her. He seems to be more passionate about his experiments and about
science than he is about human relationships. And he hears that there's going to be,
that there are these tribes people in Mexico who use psychedelic substances from mushrooms,
and he's determined to go down there and try it. And he has some weird experiences while he does

(18:16):
that. And he brings the drug back to the States where he combines the use of the drug with his
sensory deprivation techniques by floating in a tank with all sound and light taken away from him.
So he's only left with his senses and the effect of the drug. And so through his explorations of
this, he doesn't just unlock his subconscious, but he seems to have unlocked some deeper mystery

(18:40):
of the universe that resides within, even below our subconscious, perhaps even the soul who can say,
but it seems to start to physically affect the world around him to the point where he
starts to change physically. Things start to happen when he's outside of the tank.

(19:00):
Are these just more hallucinations and carryover from his experiments, or has he
actually unlocked something or brought something back from this other plane of reality? It's a
very, very interesting film. I think what makes this science fiction in my mind is it's taking
those almost, I guess, it's exploring supernatural elements or mystical elements, but applying a

(19:26):
scientific methodology to it. It's using that a modern frame of mind point of reference,
modern technology in order to explore something that has only ever been explored by religion and
by mystics and things like that. It's based on a real person who did these experiments,
which we'll talk about in a bit. What it does for me is it may be think of the whole idea of

(19:46):
the Fortean science, which I'll explain of Charles Fort was a journalist and a writer who
worked in the early 20th century, and he started to report on weird things that were going on
around the world. So if frogs falling from the sky or strange creatures being seen in

(20:08):
some rural area. So things like the Loch Ness Monster, things like even UFOs and aliens,
and all these strange phenomena, unexplained phenomena can fall under the umbrella of the
whole Fort, the idea of the Fortean subject. And by that, I mean Fort was a journalist who
didn't just take things at face value. If someone said frogs were falling from the sky,

(20:29):
he'd go and investigate and look at all the records and he'd try to find out if this is
really happening, then why is this really happening? And the idea is you don't dismiss,
but you also don't dismiss these events out of hand. You want to actually inquire and think about,
well, perhaps if we had the right tools or we had the right methodology, we could unlock these
things that we just think are supernatural or weird, and they might actually be a scientific

(20:54):
explanation for these things. So it's not believing or not disbelieving, but it's having that
inquiring mind in order to look into that. And I think this film is an example of that,
because it's based on a real person's experiments in the 50s. And I think in the 50s, 60s, 70s,
I think there was actually a time when academics and scientists would look at subjects like things

(21:17):
like cryptozoology or the idea of the soul or the afterlife with a scientific regiment of like,
well, maybe we do need to look into this. Maybe there is an explanation that we just don't know
yet because we don't have the right tool or we don't have the right thesis to unlock this mystery.

(21:38):
Of course, a lot of these things end up still being mysteries because they probably are not,
they're all just perceived in our minds or they are things that we don't have the
right technology to. So I think that's where this film falls for me is in that area. And in the
center of that in the film is our nutty professor. Yeah, so let's talk about Edward Jessup. So what

(22:01):
was interesting is that as I was kind of thinking about this film, the first thing that came to
mind was that Jessup, the name Jessup, which is a very odd name, it made me suddenly think about
Jekyll. And then I remember thinking, well, his first name is Edward. And then in Jekyll and Hyde,

(22:22):
it's Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde. So I'm assuming that maybe when Paddy Chayefsky was writing the
novel, maybe there was some kind of reference point there, the fact that his name is almost
like this combination of Jekyll and Hyde, that it isn't about he is experimenting on himself,

(22:45):
like Jekyll and Hyde, but that rather than, you know, Jekyll and Hyde kind of splitting into two,
it's all within the character. So yeah, he was a really, he is really, really kind of interesting
character. Like you say, he does fit into the kind of scientific, the stereotype of the very cold,
detached clinical scientist who is more interested and obsessed with his research. And to, you know,

(23:12):
to the point where he, you know, neglects everything else. And that's all that he really is kind of
thinking about. Well, he wants this sort of enlightenment. He has this whole idea of looking
inward and expanding his consciousness, but really he's avoiding, he's using that as a way to avoid
his real responsibilities and his real life. And I think that's the kind of overriding theme,

(23:38):
which we can talk a bit more about later, but of the film is this, it's funny that he's trying to
expand his consciousness, but it's kind of like, but he's missing everything else that's actually
right in front of him and what's around him. Also, Jessup is like, it's Jesus with a P,
like an anagram. If you put Jesus P in anagram, it's Jessup, right? I don't know. It's just something
I thought I'd kind of look. Yeah. And the Jekyll and Hyde thing, I think I was reading about

(24:02):
Chayevsky and he was discussing with his friend, Bob Fosse, about doing a story about,
inspired by Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde. And this is kind of what came out of it eventually.
Okay. So he was thinking about Jekyll and Hyde. Which yeah, I think it's very clear in that film.
But he's called, other characters in the film call him things like an unmitigated madman

(24:25):
and a Faust figure. And he calls his experiments in manifesting the subconscious physically as
a deviant concept. So he's seen as this mad scientist, this guy on the fringes of science,
pushing the boundaries of what we know and what we understand to be true in search of a greater

(24:47):
truth, really, that maybe there's this other aspect to our minds that we haven't yet unlocked that
might be the key to eternal happiness or eternal sanity, maybe, I don't know. Because he talks
about his work with schizophrenia and he says it isn't a disease and that we need to expand our
consciousness in order to sort of break the bonds of these things that sort of mental health issues

(25:15):
that keep us restricted, I suppose. Yeah. And I think there's there is the thing there is this
all this kind of religious imagery, which I think where, you know, Ken Russell always
loves to go to town with all the crazy over the top religious imagery. But it also makes me think
going back to Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein in the story as a child is obsessed with the work

(25:38):
of alchemists. So again, I think there is this weird link between, I guess, science and magic.
And yeah, and the fact that Jessup talks about that as a child, he had religious visions.
He was really religious until his father got cancer and he had such a protracted battle with
cancer and he died. And he said he basically stopped believing in God after that. And he stopped

(26:03):
having visions. And I think he also mentions that his parents weren't religious. And I think he even
mentions at one point his mother is a psychologist. Yeah. Yeah. So he's predisposed already to this
to sort of what he's about to do to himself. It's like he's got all this baggage that he comes along
with that he's trying to unburden himself of all this stuff and break through it. But really,

(26:26):
ultimately kind of turns against him really. And I think and again, it all goes back really to like
I think his father. And it also makes me think of like Ken Russell, I was just looking up because
I was thinking, yes, of all with all the really over the top Catholic imagery, I think of him

(26:47):
certainly of like The Devils or even The Lair of the White Worm as well. And in this film as well,
like was Ken Russell a Catholic? And I couldn't see any reference to him as being as a child.
But then I did find reference that he had converted to Catholic Catholicism in the 50s. And he was
born in 1927. So as an adult, he converted to Catholicism. But then he says that as he was

(27:10):
making The Devils, that was kind of the last nail on the coffin of his Catholicism. So he,
I guess he maybe had this brief flirtation. So he maybe is some he is kind of like Jessup in that
he wasn't he didn't he wasn't brought up with religion, but somehow was drawn to it.
But yeah, I just find that the whole that whole aspect of of Jessup that, you know,

(27:33):
as much as he is the cold, detached clinician, he has all these he has all these while he has
this history of like wild visions and fantasies. And even Emily talks about, you know, at one point,
they I think it's the first time we have the kind of mad kind of visions and things is,

(27:53):
I think it's after he and Emily have sex. And there's all these visions and visions of his father
in a hospital bed. And I think after they have sex, Emily asks him, like, what are you thinking
about? And he says he's thinking about God. And she and there's this there's references
throughout that she talks about like with their their sex life that they that they that it is

(28:15):
almost like, she says something like being ravaged by a mad monk, harpooned by a raging monk, other
words that she uses. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So she likes that she digs that. Yeah, yeah. So it is this
it is this interesting aspect of it that he he has this, there's, you know, I guess this,

(28:35):
I guess the obsession is with trying to find the answers to everything. But it is also about,
there's this religious aspect to it, but also this idea of just going back to the kind of
ancient primal human that certainly would be pre Christian, that the what he's trying to get to
and of course, later on, he seems to tap into that and he almost takes on this simian form,

(28:58):
this pre human form. So and the fact that he's he that he's interested in looking at his
look at his research starts with looking looking into schizophrenia before, you know, schizophrenia was
diagnosed that often people who would have been schizophrenic, we now know would be schizophrenics

(29:20):
were often people who have religious visions. And the whole idea that people, you know, many,
you know, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, people would think that, you know, I guess,
like just the voice that we will have in our head, our kind of inner monologue, people would have
thought that maybe that was the voice of God. And now, and now if you actually really do believe

(29:43):
that God is talking to you, or the devil is telling you to do things, that now we kind of
we consider that usually kind of a sign of kind of a schizophrenic personality. So it is interesting
that he's that's where his research is going is it looking looking into schizophrenia.
He believes that there's something else out there and there's something that he's

(30:07):
that he needs to find and unlock. And I think that he's from his childhood and the visions and
things like he's always been searching for for that. But then it's kind of but then I guess the
death of his father blocks him off from from the emotional side of that. It's very self-absorbed.
It's almost like the white man fantasy of being the center of the universe. And I think that's
his character journey actually is that he has to realize that he's not the center of the universe.

(30:30):
And that actually enlightenment comes from realizing that in the grand scheme of things,
it's that you're actually nothing, nothing really. And that you're like the best you can do is to
is to have to love somebody and to have these human connections and stuff because, you know,
otherwise you just go mad. Yeah. And that goes back to the whole thing with mad scientists.

(30:52):
Of course, there is the famous moment in the 1931 Frankenstein where he says it's alive. It's alive.
And then he says after that, now I know what it is to be God or something. And so the whole idea
the mad scientists is they want to be God. And so it's definitely the whole idea that all of this
research is really for Jessup is yeah, he wants to be the one to find the answer. Yeah. Yeah,

(31:16):
definitely. But then we have the ultimate message of the film. Like you say is really it's all about
there is no clear cut answer that all we have is each other rather than going into ourselves. We
should it's the journey of the destination. Yeah. But and the big connection, of course,
in the film is with his wife, Emily, played by Blair Brown. And I really like the relationship

(31:40):
between the two of them. They're so very much equals. They're both I think they're both kind
of referred to as like whiz kids. They're both they've both completed their doctorates at very
young ages. They're very, very talented at the forefront of their field. I can't remember what
she was she's she working in anthropologist. Yeah. And so yeah, when they first meet,

(32:05):
it is the kind of meeting of the minds. And she sees him in that door, like he comes through
the door, and it's almost like but it is almost kind of this religious experience, because he
comes through the door and the light streams in and she just kind of sees him silhouetted against
this bright light, which they actually wrestle mirrors later on when he's standing in a door
and he's covered in darkness. Because at the point when he's kind of at his lowest point,

(32:27):
which I think I really like, but there's that moment where he walks in, it's almost like,
yeah, she has this almost religious experience seeing this guy walk in who she's just like,
who is this guy? Who's this tall drink of water? And then the whole fact that that that I think
she even says that, yeah, even sex is a mystical experience that the that they're joining together

(32:48):
is what often is is this for him is maybe tapping into this higher or this religious aspect. And he's
not actually realising that until the end that yes, that's where yeah, that's really happened.
That's where the enlightenment happens. Yeah. And also, I like I like that party scene for

(33:08):
another reason as well is that they're all these cool Harvard scientists who are smoking weed and
they're listening to The Doors, which means which is referencing the doors of perception wink, wink.
So there's kind of foreshadowing there. And I also thought like, could these be like,
these people at this party? Are they the parents of Clive and Elsa from Splice?
Yeah, it kind of gives me that sort of vibe as well of like, these are the new up and comers

(33:30):
who are like, we don't we don't believe in the old order, we're going to break the old order and
dive deep into these new areas of scientific exploration.
And that actually makes me think because I was looking up just like on IMDB or whatever
about the film, just reminding myself, you know, who plays what and their names and things.

(33:51):
And in one of the synopses that was put on there by I think people could just put their own
synopsis on IMDB. And someone says that and it says that this film is taking place in the 60s.
I don't think it really comes down. I don't know. I always thought it was the set. It felt like the
70s to me. I mean, because the doors were 70s, weren't they? But like, no, 60s, 60s, sorry.

(34:15):
So I don't know. But like, it didn't feel like it didn't feel like it was taking place at any
particular time. Yeah, because it comes out in 1980. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I just assumed it
was 70s. It felt because it would have been shot in like 78 79. So it does feel kind of 70s to me.
Yeah. But it's just like, I never even thought that. But of course, the whole thing was that
a lot, I guess a lot of this experimentation was happening in in the 60s. Well, that's what I was

(34:39):
talking about the 40 and stuff of this is this is when they were doing all this stuff. Like the
I mean, I'm going to I can go on to talk about the guy who it's based on because he
Yeah, his experience of being done in the 50s. Okay. So this is this is the time where these
sorts of things are happening where there was actually a scientific interest in this stuff.
And you could get grants to do this stuff, which now I want to think it's nonsense because as it

(35:03):
went on, there was no one got any results. So they just abandoned it. And also because the
government because of the Cold War, the government were offering all these classified
contracts to scientists and stuff. Because if you got to say, oh, I'm doing this classified
experiment for the government, you would guaranteed research money. So there's a lot of that stuff
going on at that time. So I think we should we should go into because I know that this is something

(35:26):
that you really do have an interest. I know over the years of all the strange books that MK ultra
and psychedelic experiments and things. So I kind of want you to take us through. So who is Edward
Jessup based on and yeah, it seems like you mentioned, you know, in the 1950s, it very much is coming

(35:47):
out of World War Two. I'm assuming yeah, yeah, a lot of the German scientists who get accepted if
it's part of part of that coming out of the kind of nuclear tests. And I guess the whole thing,
why I always just think about your MK ultra and the Manchurian candidate whole idea. But yeah,
who who was it? Well, I mean, there's there's this Operation Paperclip was what brought the

(36:08):
Nazis scientists over and they helped build like rockets and stuff. But like that, there was also
that it's that it was that whole it was under that whole thing of all the government spending all
this money on research and stuff because of the Cold War and not wanting to be left behind by the
Soviets and by China and stuff. So it was like any they just threw money at whatever. So at which
I'll get to with I'll try not to bog us down in too much detail. But so John C. Lilly was the guy

(36:33):
that Jessup is based on real life scientist. He was working with sensory deprivation stuff in the
50s at the National Institute of Health in Washington. But he started out doing and now this
is very strange stuff. But he was doing electric stimulation of the brain to find out parts of
the brain that basically operated things like fear and pain. And so he would put electrodes into

(36:56):
monkeys and electrically stimulate the electrodes, right? He even found the center like that a control
like the bits of brain that control like erection and orgasm. And apparently they gave a monkey
access to the to his own orgasm switch, which he would hit every three minutes.

(37:17):
Because he was just like, boop, instant orgasm. And it's like, well, there you go. That's if we
were all given our orgasm, we just all be sitting there pressing that all day. And this led him
to wanting to do sensory deprivation because he wanted to look then at the brain in isolation
from any stimuli and what it could do. So he'd build these tanks, which were filled with fluid

(37:39):
that you'd float in. So you weren't touching anything solid, you were just kind of it was
kind of womb like, and you would have blockout sound. And all you'd have is your own brain and
darkness. And the idea is that you start to then hallucinate or you start to things start to happen
within your mind that didn't you didn't think would happen before. Also, he was a big fan of

(38:02):
doing experiments on himself, which is what happens in the film. So yes, so he would take LSD and
jump in the tank to try and achieve the higher state of consciousness that he was seeking.
And this became gave made him a cult figure within the counterculture. So I guess you're
getting to that point where people like Timothy Leary and all of that sort of stuff, who were like

(38:24):
these rock star scientists and thinkers because they were using drugs and and you know, grooving man.
But this also made him a pariah within scientific circles.
Aldous Huxley, the famous sci-fi writer and proponent of drugs,
he said that what men like Lilley are doing in the laboratory was done by the Christian

(38:46):
Hermits in the Taybad and elsewhere and by Hindu and Tibetan Hermits in the remote
fastness of the Himalayas. My own belief is that these experiences really tell us something about
the nature of the universe, that they are valuable in themselves and above all, valuable when
incorporated into our world picture and acted upon in normal life. So what is where is that quote from?

(39:08):
So that's it was a footnote in a book, one of my favorite books, The Search for the Manchurian

Candidate (39:14):
The CAA and Mind Control by John Marks. And you can't see, but it's very well loved.
And there's all sorts of little bookmarks and things. So yeah.
And in fact, I've written in the margins in this bit about John Lilley, I've actually written in
pencil Walter Bishop question mark, which is the character from Fringe, which I think Fringe takes
a lot. Absolutely. From Altered States, we could talk about it a bit. But so he was this, yeah,

(39:39):
a countercultural figure, doing all of these sensory deprivation techniques. But he abandoned
his research. And maybe this was in an earlier version of the story of Altered States, but
I can see if it was why they cut it out, because you want to focus more on the personal journey
of the character. But basically, the CIA came knocking and they wanted to use his research

(40:03):
and him to do more research to use sensory deprivation as a means of interrogation and mind
control within an operation called Artichoke, which would eventually become MKUltra, which is
their operation, which they were trying to find a surefire way to basically break down somebody
mentally in order to get them to just say whatever they wanted them to say.

(40:26):
And possibly mind control, like get someone to do something that we would never normally do in
real life, in their normal life. Okay, kind of make them into assassins as well. That's one theory.
And they did try and do that. They tried to use hypnosis and stuff. And it just,
the human brain is too complex for it to get any measurable results. But there's a guy who

(40:47):
worked across the hall from Lilley. I won't go too much into it, but Maitland Baldwin,
if anybody's familiar with MKUltra and all of that stuff, like me, he's infamous, because they came
to him and they, well, when Lilley said no, they went, Baldwin, would you like to do it? He's like,
yeah, fine, I'll do it. So he didn't have scruples. Because Lily was like, I'm not going to do that.

(41:08):
That's horrible. And he and Maitland Baldwin was like, I'll do it. And so, and his whole thing was
using sensory deprivation, drugs, isolation to enact, yeah, psychic, what they call psychic
driving, which is trying to break somebody down to basically be a blank slate and then rebuilt
to be whoever you wanted them to be. So then Lily left that field and then he moved into behavioral

(41:28):
work with dolphins and trying to understand their intelligence and communicate with them. And this
work inspired another movie starring George C. Scott called The Day of the Dolphin, which, yeah,
is about trying to sort of work with dolphins and figure out what their deal is. Yeah, so you can
see that there are all these experiments happening with psychedelics. And yeah, a lot of it kind

(41:53):
of came into the counterculture, but it is interesting that it all came from a very, like,
government wanting to control people. And it became this way for a lot of people to, as Timothy
Leary says, a dropout of society almost. Well, yeah, I mean, because while cultures and civilizations
were using psychedelics for thousands of years, I mean, that's where you found, you know, it wasn't,

(42:14):
it wasn't until the 40s and 50s that I suppose the West, I suppose, is sort of like America,
Britain, these countries were starting to get into it and discover these things. Like, I think it
was in the 50s that the first white men went down to rural, like the deepest jungles of Mexico and
eight mushrooms. And then in 1943, Albert Hoffman, the scientist who was working for

(42:37):
Sandals Pharmaceuticals, was trying to make a stimulant for childbirth and accidentally invented
LSD. Oh, wow. And so that was made in a lab using various different things, but that was using an
ergot derivative, which is kind of from fungus and stuff anyway. And he mistakenly ingested it. And
then there's a famous story that he was riding his bike home, and then he just suddenly felt like

(42:57):
he wanted to die and having all these horrible things because he was tripping and he didn't
know what was going on. So scientists immediately viewed this new drug as a way to kind of help
people suffering from mental health. They immediately realized that this is to help people with
schizophrenia, depression, that sort of thing, and even substance abuse. But the government also
saw the potential of its use as a weapon and an interrogation tool. Like I said, with MK Ultra,

(43:22):
they wanted to use it for all of that. And they put a lot of controls on the drug, on LSD specifically
and psychedelics, because they didn't want anyone, they only wanted to use it for their
experiments. They didn't want it to get out. They didn't want it to be in the world. It's like,
because they thought, well, if this can be used for mind control, then we want to have control of
it. Because they saw the show, there were these kangaroo courts and show trials in Russia.

(43:47):
In the Korean War, the Chinese were capturing American pilots and getting them to go on TV
and say, I renounce America, I renounce capitalism, I'm now a communist. And they're like,
how the hell did they do that? And so they thought that there was this mind control gap where
the communists had all this ability to control people's minds and the US had nothing. So they were

(44:08):
going to try and jumpstart the program by using drugs. Of course, none of it worked. But what
they did do, and I think we've kind of touched on it, is that they somehow invented the counter
culture because they were sending samples of LSD to universities, colleges, for scientists to do
experiments on. And people like Timothy Leary were getting their hands on this stuff. And instead of

(44:31):
like doing experiments with it, they're just like, oh, this shit's pretty good. And they were like
giving it to their students and other people. And then suddenly, you're, and then suddenly,
everyone's using it recreationally. And it's allowing people, and it is expanding people's,
expanding people's consciousness. And they're realizing it's suddenly having all these anti
establishment thoughts and things. So they shut it all down. And they stop, and even scientists

(44:53):
who are doing proper experiments with it on mental health and, and substance abuse and stuff,
aren't allowed to do anything with it anymore, because they're just shut it all down because
they don't want all this stuff happening. It's, it's wild stuff. It's just crazy.
And you even see the in, in Altered States at the beginning, where Jessup has starting to kind

(45:14):
of work in this area, he meets Emily, and they end up getting married. And then the film kind of
cuts to seven years later, they've both been working at Harvard, they now have children.
So it's this whole thing that they've kind of settled down into domesticity, although they're
both, they're both very much doing, doing their work. But I think Jessup is becoming really

(45:38):
discontented. And when the Bob Balaban character, I can't remember, is he called Arthur?
Yeah, I think when he, yeah, so when it cuts to the seven years later, Arthur and his wife come
to visit them, and they find out that Edward and Emily are about to have a divorce.
Yeah. And, and, and Jessup is kind of saying that, yeah, I'm working, but you know, it's just, I'm just,

(46:01):
it's not stuff that I'm really interested in and fulfilling him. And so he kind of wants to
take a step away, not just from the work he's doing, but he obviously is viewing just his whole life,
which is being husband and father, he needs to kind of get away and he needs to get back
into this research. Not long after that is when he goes to Mexico, I believe. So it's after.

(46:25):
Yeah. So he has like one experiment where he starts to have visions through sensory deprivation and
stuff. And where you see kind of visions of his father and a lot of Catholic imagery. And there's
that great, there's that multi-headed, old multi-eyed ram that's got like, but it's like,
its head is Jesus on the cross with this weird gnarly ram's head with all these eyes and it's

(46:46):
excellent. And so he's, and it's almost like that this is his first foray to breaking down all that
baggage in his subconscious, like the images of his dad, the religious imagery and stuff. And then
yeah, he fight now that he's had a divorce and he's kind of free of the family. He goes to Mexico
because he hears about the tribe down there using basically, ayahuasca. And he goes and tries it out.

(47:08):
And he has this massive hallucination that sort of focuses in on, there's images of him and his
wife in this kind of weird Victorian domestic scene. So it's obviously there's that baggage now,
the guilty over hit, like the divorce thing, his wife is kind of being played through.
And then she kind of turns in, or then there's this like lizard that turns into her, that then

(47:29):
she turns to sand and he turns to sand. And then there's this really long scene where the wind
comes in and the sand versions of the two of them just start to get blown away. And it just seems
to go on forever. That's really long time. It's great. It's so good because it's it's preceded by
all this mad stuff like fireworks going off, giant mushrooms, just weird, like just all this imagery

(47:54):
crashing into each other. And it's like really fast and frenetic. And then suddenly it just,
all of that stops and then we're just watching these, the sand get blown away. And it's beautiful.
It's stunning. Like Ken Russell's was hired for this film because of his visual style. And
the hallucination scenes in this film are amazing. And then when it cuts back to like the next day,
there's this corpse of a lizard next to him. And apparently in the tribe, kick him out,

(48:18):
kick him out because they're like, he killed this lizard. And he doesn't even remember doing it.
And I think that's the first manifestation of sort of the
darkness inherent in the human psyche that is being loosed by his experiments that
there's really, there's that he's not being enlightened, but he's kind of unearthing or
revealing something, revealing something darker within himself.

(48:41):
And I think it's also within that that sequence, that hallucination,
there are all these images of ancient people or, you know, like pre human.
He's like tapping into an ancient.
Yeah. So I think it's interesting that you talk about the the shots of him and Victorian,
Victorian dress and being about his, his guilt to me, that just seemed like that was kind of

(49:04):
civilized, civilized self. And that he was going back even further. Because I guess the whole
thing is that the Victorian is kind of in the past, but then he's going back, back, back,
further and tapping into some ancient thing. And this whole idea of, of the lizard, it made me
think of like the reptilian brain, which is supposed to be this kind of completely the primitive part

(49:25):
of our brains that we have in within our brains, this kind of reptilian brain.
Yeah. And then you have Emily lying like the lizard, but then he kills a lizard. So there's
an interesting weird kind of connection there that did he see this lizard and thinking it was

(49:45):
Emily. And so this whole thing of, yeah, the, the violence, sex and death all coming together.
And that, and that he ends up committing this violent act that yeah, it often seems to, as we
go forward with a lot of the other experiments that he does with the drug. I mean, the next,

(50:05):
the next experiment that he does when they bring the drug from Mexico back and he's in the isolation
tank. And what's interesting about this experiment is that we don't see in any visions.
No, he just narrates what's going on. Yeah. So we're outside. So the shot is of outside the
tank. And we hear Jessup inside the tank and he's narrating. Yeah. And he's going back further and

(50:32):
further backwards in time to the time of the first man of sort of the eight, eight men, the
Australopithecine, I suppose, or somewhere around abouts. And he's, he's like, and he's observing
what's going on. He's seeing these green fields and trees and things. And he's seeing these eight
men. And then he's like, no, now I've become one. And now we're hunting and stalking. And he's,

(50:52):
he's killing a goat. And then you start hearing these primal noises. Like he's not even talking
anymore. He's just like grunting and gnashing teeth. And then when they go to check on him,
he's just got blood all come all over his mouth as if he's, that's the goat's blood.
And then they pull him out of the tank and he can't even speak. He's just grunting,

(51:13):
but he can write and he's writing to tell them, you know, I need you to do this, that and the
other before I reconstitute. And they do the tests afterwards where they find something in his,
well, they do x-rays and they find that he's got sort of his, his physiognomy has changed
to be more like primate like, and I think he even, and he's got these extra, all this kind of

(51:37):
thing on his neck, which, yeah. And they, his doctor friend, he's kind of helping him. There's
him and Bob Balaban, like he's helping him with the experiments shows him, just shows the x-rays
to a guy who doesn't know who Jess appears. And he says, this guy's a fucking gorilla.
Like you're showing me a gorilla's x-rays. So his, his, his delving into the subconscious is

(51:58):
regressing him so far back within his own timeline or in the timeline of humanity that he's actually
presenting with physical manifestations of this subconscious or of this collective hive
mind thing, that something that he's unleashing. And so after that, later on, he's, he starts to have

(52:22):
visions of his like hands and feet looking like, like, yeah, he's having these like,
his skin starts to kind of bubble and contort and these great physical effects by Dick Smith.
Look terrific. And then he goes to have a shower and he looks down his feet are all by,
are all like prehensile and ape like, and he kind of laughs at that and it disappears. And it's like,

(52:43):
oh, I'm just kind of having an acid flashback. And then when he exits the, the bathroom, it's
like the gates of hell are open and there's just all this fire and brimstone and demons flying out.
And it just, and it's like, is he just having like residual hallucinations or is something else going
on? It's, he's, yeah. And he's like, and then I think he sits down to write a report about it and

(53:05):
the bubbles start coming up on his arms again. And he looks at it and starts laughing or smiling,
like he can't believe this is happening, but this is exactly what he wanted. And like he's,
he got that scientific mind kicks in of like, this is something I, you know,
I've got something here. I'm onto something. And then it's with the next. So he does another
experiment in the tank and he does it by himself. This is where he gets, he has this kind of full

(53:29):
on transformation. Yeah. And I think cause after the, the first experiment, they kind of don't want,
his friends don't want anything to do with him. So he goes and does it by himself. And yeah. And he,
he goes back into the tank and he fully regresses and basically comes out of the tank as an eight
man, now played by a dancer, Miguel Godro. So it's not even, it's not willing to hurt anymore

(53:54):
because they've got this actual physical actor, just screaming and hollering and running around.
And he runs up against, he comes up against the security guard who he bashes over the head and
we think he's killed him. And he's just ape man is just running around. He escapes the laboratories,
running through the streets, just free of, of any of that baggage of any of society's norms. He's just

(54:18):
this creature out in the night and he finds, comes across the zoo, scales the wall of the zoo,
running around, basically being a nuisance to all the animals until he gets into an enclosure
filled with what they call later a sheep. But I don't know what kind of sheep it is. It doesn't
look like a sheep to me, but. And a sheep in a zoo? Yeah. But I'm not a zoologist, so I can't comment.

(54:43):
But he then hunt, actually hunts and kills this creature. And then American Werewolf in London
like he's found the next day, naked lying next to this bloodied corpse of this sheep.
And I think that's when they start his sort of, yeah, his colleagues and his wife

(55:03):
starts to really worry about what he's been up to. And then I think they find out he didn't kill,
but he's like, I think I killed a guy last night and he's kind of not, doesn't care.
He's glib about it all. It's like, you just come out of jail and you were found naked in a zoo next to a,
you know, a mauled animal. But yeah, it is, and it is, you know, it makes a lot of sense that he

(55:27):
ends up in the zoo, that he's with all the other animals. So it is this interesting thing in,
I guess, contradiction that what he's trying to do is almost this higher ideal or,
but yet it's just bringing him back to a primal animal state. So this is this interesting
contradiction. Yeah. And it does go towards that thing I was talking about with the government,

(55:49):
where they were trying to do the psychic driving, like that's the sort of effect they were probably
in a way looking for of regressing somebody so far back that they can, they could have become
not human anymore, I suppose. But then this is the problem with it is that you become animalistic and
animalistic and it's not, yeah, it's never what you plan it's going to be like.

(56:10):
Although he says, I think at one point that, yeah, that I was utterly primal, just trying to get
through the night to eat to sleep. And he also says that it was the most, the most supremely
satisfying night of my life. And then I think not long after that, he's like, oh, but I think I may
have killed someone. Yeah. And it turns out he didn't kill him, he's all right. But I think there's

(56:31):
a throwaway line where they're like, oh, no, he's fine. He's had a bop on the head.
Yeah, I mean, that would complicate things too much if he actually did become a murderer.
But I think this is also what proves, sort of proves to, you know, that his colleagues and
his wife that what he's doing is actually making sense that there's, there's something to this.
And then there's the next experiment they do where they come back and Emily's there too.

(56:55):
But in that, it sort of, it gets to an even more primordial state almost where he starts to,
um, they see him on the screen starting to morph into something, not even another creature,
like something more even go regressive than that, like pre pre bipedal into kind of almost

(57:15):
protozoic primordial shapes. And then, and I think they all pass out, don't they? Because then they
all wait, suddenly wake up or Emily suddenly wakes up. Bob Balaban sees it on the screen and
that it's all these lights coming out and it kind of hypnotizes him. Um, he take the other guy, I
can't remember the character, Mason, Mason takes her out, Emily's like freaking out, takes her,
she passes out, he takes her out. And when he goes to open the, um, Sensory Deprivation Tank,

(57:40):
all this light and like smoke just blasts out at him. And it's like his, so it's like he's become
just pure energy almost. And it just all kind of distract destroys, almost destroys the lab around
them. Um, and then I think that's the final straw for everybody of just like, you've, and I think
at some point Emily says to them when it's all going on, it's like, what if he's right? What if

(58:00):
he's changing? What if this is something else in that we've, we're not even ready for?
But then the fact is, is that the room does fill with water. Well, then that's the next one after
that is, yeah, I thought no, I thought the one with Emily and then water comes into the anyway.
But then, then there's another one where he's doing, and it's just him, the two of them. And it,

(58:21):
it's sort of the, um, she looks, the, you see the Sensory Deprivation Tank and you can kind of see
through it and it becomes this womb gestating this, he's become, he's becoming this creature now,
this weird amoebic thing. And then yeah, all the, um, the force of it starts to break the whole
lab apart. And I think the water from the sprinkler system or something comes down

(58:42):
and it fills with water, but the, um, the tank implodes to become almost like this whirlpool
black hole thing. And she has to go in and like dive down into this, I guess, subconscious
singularity that he's created and pull him back out of whatever he's done to himself. And,

(59:04):
and it's almost, you feel like they're all going to be sucked in and destroyed by this thing that
he's tacked into. And then you kind of, she saves him, but she's the one who pulls him up and out
of this thing. And, um, and then the next scene is basically the end of the film where you think
everything's fine. And then suddenly he, he sees the bumps in his skin and he just suddenly regresses

(59:25):
and becomes this weird creature again. It's like, it's not over. And when Emily tries to help him,
it kind of infects her and she turns into this weird thing. And then it's his realization at that
point that, oh, she's everything to me. She just saved, she just saved him. And it's the whole idea,
even, the thing where that where it all fills with water, I mean, the whole thing of water and

(59:47):
goes back to birth and that they've, they're in this womb and the fact that she kind of pulls
him out, she almost becomes like the mother. Yeah, true. Yeah. Like, yeah, pulling him into,
you know, out of the womb into, into life. So there's this interesting, I guess you could
all of a sudden say that there is kind of almost a Jesus Mary thing going on between the two of

(01:00:08):
them as well. And then, and then it's that, that final scene where it's the realization that the,
the love between them is, I guess what's going to save him or, you know,
cause he has to like break it. He, now it's his job to save her and he has to kind of break out.
He just like hits his arm against the wall and kind of has these, he kind of goes through the
stages and then he kind of breaks out of it and he, he saves her because I think, and that represents

(01:00:32):
the character journey at the center of the film that, yeah, he realizes that he wanted eternal
enlightenment, but it was his love for, and Emily, that is the true enlightenment. Like, yeah,
love saves the day, which is, talking about mad scientist stories being conservative, it is quite
a bit of a conservative message if you want to go with that or, you know, hackneyed even if you

(01:00:54):
want to say. Yeah, yeah. Cause I mean, the thing is, is that when, when we say it and you just think,
oh God, okay, yeah, love saves the day, that it's all about the love between them, that, that he's
now, that they're now going to be the, the nice stable family and he's not going to have to worry
about doing these silly things anymore and he's going to be a good husband and father. So when
you think of it in that way, I'm like, yeah, that is a conservative message, but the film, thankfully,

(01:01:19):
it doesn't, it doesn't feel that way. Yeah. And that maybe it is more about that disconnect,
he's trying to go kind of inward to the connect, to a connection with, I guess, a primal self.
But I guess that whole thing was that primal, that primal self, it's actually more just a tapping into,

(01:01:41):
I guess it really is the connection between people. It isn't about your own enlightenment,
it's about the realization, I guess that we're all, that we are all connected.
We are all interconnected, yeah. And it's not all about the one person, it's about all of us.
But also I think it's about that as a society, we're so conditioned by religion,

(01:02:02):
socio-cultural forces and all these things that we have too much, it's almost like reaching for
enlightenment, we're looking for this deeper mystery, it becomes destructive. And we want to
pull back the veil to see God, but all we see, but really it's just ourselves and everything that,
you know, and it's that Frankensteinian thing of doing it because you could, not because you should.

(01:02:26):
And I think, you know, what happens at the end of the film, you could say it suggests that
this could happen again to them, like it's not over, but that he's taking his first step towards
realizing what he should have been seeking all along. Or you can just say, yeah, it's a
pat ending that's silly. But then it makes you think of a lot of other ancient forms of knowledge,

(01:02:50):
like I think about, well, Jung had the idea of the collective unconscious, that the unconscious
state is actually a collective one shared by everyone and that you can tap into it and the
whole idea that different stories and archetypes come up again and again, even from civilizations
that were completely separate from each other. So is there something inherently human about

(01:03:13):
his story? Well, he was very much about like stories and archetypes and things. And even like with
forms of meditation is about tapping into like with transcendental meditation, it's about the
unified field. And they've actually found that within physics, there's something like that,
that that state exists as well. So this whole idea that there is separation between each person

(01:03:40):
and thing in the world is maybe more of a later stage, maybe you could even say like,
capitalist, the whole thing of like, we just want to, you're just, it's just yourself and you've got
to get stuff for yourself. But yeah, if you if you really want to tap into like the more kind of,

(01:04:00):
I guess, ancient state of being, it is about our connections with each other, which is a nice way
to think I actually, you know. And also in terms of psychedelic drugs and stuff, what those people
say about ketamine is that because we produce low levels of it in our bodies already. And then when
you actually, when people actually take it in large amounts, they do all have the same experience,
at least originally, they all have like, there's like a talking wall or something. And like,

(01:04:24):
everybody has like, it's almost like there is this sort of
ante room that you go into that everybody goes into before they have their whatever experience
they're going to have that there's almost this qualifying moment where like, and so
they shared hallucinations by people who take those, those drugs and things.
And it but it's like, but even like people who aren't even in the same room, like people who

(01:04:47):
recount using it in different contexts, not know who don't know each other or have at least to begin
with the same experience. So this, you know, you wonder, you know, and also with ayahuasca, apparently
it's made up of two different people have the same experience on that, but it's made up of two different
or ingredients. Like who just how long did it take to discover that you take this bit from here and

(01:05:10):
this bit from there, you put it together, you create this thing and you meet these entities
when you're when you do it. So it's like, and it comes from the earth. Yeah. So they, you know,
if you wanted to, you could talk about how there might be something this collective unconscious
that you can actually access. Like it's a Fortean idea, isn't it? And I was thinking that that a lot of
like people who have psychedelic experience, I always think of the Bill Hicks's stand up routine

(01:05:36):
where it ends with his whole kind of monologue about what if we had like the news was there was
good good news on on on the television and this whole idea of we all one consciousness experiencing
itself. How about a positive LSD story? Wouldn't that be newsworthy just wants to base your decision
on information rather than scare tactics and superstitions and lies? I think it would be newsworthy.

(01:06:06):
Today, young man on acid realizes that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration
that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as
death. Life is only a dream and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather.

(01:06:29):
But yeah, a lot of people who have those psychedelic experiences and there's I think
there's even I think you've actually told me about how they're they were doing experiments
with people like with terminal illnesses and giving them LSD and they were no longer fearing death.
Yeah, yeah. And there's and there's been experiments in that and also
with substance abuse, like the guy who created Alcoholics Anonymous was treated with psychedelics

(01:06:56):
to break his crippling alcohol dependency and addiction. And he thought he met God, which is why
Alcoholics Anonymous he created the 12 step program after meeting God basically.
Okay, because they have to part of that is about there is a higher power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So
there's an acceptance of a higher power because that's was his experience. So I mean, yeah,
it's powerful stuff that when I think it can be used correctly. And I think people like Jessup

(01:07:22):
and Lilley were like pushing the boundaries of what it could do. And I guess you always need
someone to go push the boat out and to see what where the limits are.
Yeah. At the time that the film came out was was it well accepted or like critically or
commercially? What was what was the what was the response when it first came out?

(01:07:44):
It was a budget of $15 million and it made almost 20 million. So it made its money back.
It was Oscar nominated for sound and score. Reviews at the time was strong with Ken Russell
actually saying that he felt he got more plaudits for Altered States than he had what for any of
his previous films at that point, or at least in a while. And John C. Lilley himself reportedly

(01:08:08):
liked the film. There's stories that the stories that like 2001 a space Odyssey, which some of the
special effects reminds me of, there are a lot of young people going in high to watch it. And even
I was reading in that Ken Russell book you showed me that people were going and taking
like in between the hallucinatory scenes were going outside to do more drugs. And then someone
would come and go hallucinations are starting and they'd come back in. So they didn't even care

(01:08:31):
about all the in between bits. Film critic Richard Corliss at the time called it dazzling
science fiction. He said madness is its subject and substance style and spirit. The film changes
tone even form with its heroes every new mood and mutation. It expands and contracts with
his mind until both almost crack. It keeps threatening to go bonkers, then makes good on

(01:08:53):
its threat and still remains as lucid as an aerialist on a high wire. But Pauline Kael,
on the other hand, said that the gross grotesquely inspired combination of Russell and his with his
showbiz Catholic glitz mysticism and Chayefsky with his showbiz Jewish ponderousness results in
an aggressively silly picture that isn't really enjoyable. But it's got yeah, it's got a Rotten

(01:09:21):
Tomatoes score of 86%. And it called some people call it extraordinarily daring for a Hollywood
film, which I agree with. Because it was Ken Russell's first Hollywood film that he'd been working in
British film and TV. Although I do know that him he and Paddy Chayefsky did not get on right.

(01:09:41):
No, and I think Russell, I think it may be the only film that he did just for the money,
like they offered him a bucketload of cash and he took it. But Paddy Chayefsky was he's the Academy
Academy Award winning writer of films like Marty and Network. He had a very a lot of power in
Hollywood where I think the deal he made with Altered States is that he basically had creative
control over it, even though he wasn't the director. I don't know if he's he may have been a producer

(01:10:05):
have a producer credit, but he took his name off the film in the end as the writer. He called
him he's called Sydney Aaron, which is his original his birth names. Original director was Arthur Penn,
who directed Bonnie and Clyde, who had a fight with Chayefsky and quit the picture. Apparently,
he wanted to be fired because then he'd get paid still for even though he didn't make the film.

(01:10:27):
So they had to go find a new director. Ken Russell wasn't their first choice. He was their 27th
choice. But behind Spielberg, Lucas, Stapama, Coppola, even Ingmar Bergman.
That would have been Woody Allen. So they Nicholas Rogue was approached.

(01:10:48):
So they eventually went to Russell because of his his good visual style. Russell and Chayefsky,
I think clashed at every turn. They both had opposing ideas, both strong willed,
both wouldn't back down. Apparently, Chayefsky started secretly meeting people behind his back.
Production staff and even cast. So he eventually banned him from the set.

(01:11:12):
I think Penn had already cast the film. So the cast was already locked. So Russell didn't have
only made the film and had, I guess, you know, oversaw the making of the post production or the
special effects and things. Chayefsky took his name off the film. And so yeah, it was very fraught
production. But apparently, Ken Russell said he had a great time making it. He said the producers

(01:11:35):
never told him about the he always thought they'd be all about the money and be like, oh,
you're spending too much money. He said he'd know whatever bothered him about that stuff. He said it
was actually a good experience, even though when you read about all the fights he had with Chayefsky,
it seems pretty crazy. And even said at one point that he thought William Hurt was in love with him,
Ken Russell did. So like it's, yeah, it sounded like the pretty wild. Yeah.

(01:11:59):
And I think even more now, the film is well known, but also well liked. That
that newer generations, I think really respond to the film.
You could approach it as a kind of, oh, look at this funny film from the 80s or whatever.
But I mean, I think because of how LSD and psychedelics have become more well,

(01:12:24):
well, sort of spread out through culture, there's less of a stigma about it and more people have
probably taken it and know what it's like. And so they're watching it for that, for that reason,
as a, you know, or as a, yeah, get high and watch the film. Sure, that's still.
And I think it's also the whole thing that you do get just people now going and taking ayahuasca.

(01:12:46):
I mean, we were just recently on the train and there was a woman on the phone telling her friend
about that she was going, that she was having all these weird treatments and that I think she was
saying, oh yeah, the next one is going to be having ayahuasca. And it was this whole thing of like,
it has become almost like a commodity. It just seems to go against the whole idea of it. Just
anyone, you know, you get all these, I don't know, young professionals who go and pay to have their,

(01:13:13):
almost like a spa treatment, but with ayahuasca and whatever.
Yeah. And the communities down in Mexico and things like that don't appreciate it.
No. At all. I mean, it's a good film as well. I really like it. I think, yeah, Ken Russell,
I mean, and all the, all the scenes between the hallucinations are, I think they're really well

(01:13:35):
staged and managed because it's like, I think, because Ken Russell knows you don't, because,
you know, he can, he makes, made some loopy movies, but he knows to keep that grounded because the
hallucinations don't work if the film itself isn't grounded, those scenes aren't grounded in between.
And it is all, it all boils down to that central relationship between Eddie and Emily and, and

(01:13:57):
William Hurt and Blair Brown really, yeah, make those characters likable that even if it does
have what you might consider kind of almost a cheesy ending that they sell it and that it
doesn't come across that way. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So that's Altered States.

(01:14:26):
Herbert West is at the top of his class in medical school. How can you teach such dribble?
These people are here to learn and you're closing their minds before they even have a chance.
He's brilliant, but a little weird. I've broken the six to 12 minute barrier. I've conquered
brain death. His experiments have always been unorthodox. It was dead.

(01:14:49):
But lately they're getting on a fence.
And he's just made a discovery that could wake up the dead.
Herbert West has affected reanimation and dead animal tissue. What are you thinking? How do you feel?
You 15 cc's of reagent being in. Once you wake up the dead, you've got a real mess on your hands.

(01:15:30):
You're insane. Now what happened? I had to kill him. He's dead. Not anymore.
Herbert West brought a lot of dead people back to life

(01:15:51):
and not one of them showed any appreciation.
HP Lovecraft's classic tale of horror reanimator. Mr West. You'll never get credit for my discovery.
Who's going to believe a talking head, get a job in a sideshow. It will scare you to pieces.

(01:16:17):
So Lindsay, who and what is reanimator? Reanimator is a 1985 film directed by Stuart
Gordon and it's adapted from the short story Herbert West Re-Animator written by HP Lovecraft.
And so the film opens in Zurich. We come onto this really chaotic scene where a professor,

(01:16:46):
who's actually called Hans Gruber, is having this strange attack. His eyes are bulging out and he
seemingly dies and in the room with him is this young medical student called Herbert West.
And people kind of burst in as this professor is kind of going crazy and seemingly dying.

(01:17:07):
Seemingly dying. And someone says to Herbert West, you killed him. And then
Herbert West looking straight into the camera goes, no, I gave him life. And then it cuts to,
I guess not long, not long after that. Herbert West is now studying at the Miskatonic University
in America. And he's looking for somewhere to live. So he meets Dan Kane, who's another

(01:17:31):
medical student, who is actually in a relationship with the Dean's daughter. So Dean Halsey and his
daughter Megan. But Megan and Dan have to keep their relationship quiet. But she says she's going
to marry him once he graduates. West shows up and so he's answering Dan's ad for a housemate.

(01:17:53):
And he pretty much makes himself at home quite quickly. I think one of his first questions is,
do you have a basement? Which they do. So he's like, yep, I'm coming in. I'm going to live here now.
And then one night, Dan and Megan come home and their cat Rufus is missing. And they're trying to

(01:18:14):
kind of find where the cat is. They end up going into Herbert West's room. He has a fridge in his
room and they open it up and they see the dead body of Rufus, which is very, very sad. And then
later on, there are these strange noises coming from the basement. Dan goes down and sees West

(01:18:36):
with Rufus, who is now been brought back to life, but he's acting very violently is attacking Herbert.
And then from there, he, Dan is kind of told about Herbert's experiments where he has a reagent,
this glowing green fluid, that if he injects it into a corpse, it seems to come back to life,

(01:19:01):
but it always seems to come back quite, quite violent. Dan tells the Dean about Herbert's
experiments and they end up getting barred from school. And so they break in and try a reagent
on a corpse, which of course, as always, starts to act violently. The Dean comes in and while
this corpse is, reanimated corpse is kind of flailing around, Halsey ends up being killed. And

(01:19:28):
then they reanimate him, but he's in this kind of strange zombie-like state and he gets committed.
And so there's another Professor, Carl Hill, who realises West's experiments and while he's performing
a lobotomy on the Dean, he realises he's dead. And so then he tries to blackmail Herbert West

(01:19:55):
to give him all his notes and basically he's going to take credit for his work, but then West
kills him, decapitates him and brings back the head and body separately back to life.
And then you have this battle between the now reanimated Carl Hill, who also has designs
on Megan and West and Dan, who want to take back their experiment. They find Megan, who's been

(01:20:24):
kidnapped by Hill, a big fight breaks out because Hill also has been reanimating lots of other corpses,
which he's able to control telepathically as well. And then it kind of ends with all these
reanimated corpses and all fighting each other off. And Dan and Megan managed to escape, but

(01:20:44):
West puts more reagent into Hill's body and then Hill's kind of entrails come out. And the last
we see of West is kind of he's been taken over by all these intestines and entrails. So Dan and
Megan escape, but then Megan is attacked and strangled by one of the corpses. And so the film ends

(01:21:04):
with Dan seemingly about to reanimate Megan. And who is the nutty professor in this instance?
Yeah. So yeah, this is all about Herbert West. So the actual source story, Herbert West Re-Animator,
is told from this unnamed narrator's perspective, who is basically the accomplice of Herbert West,

(01:21:29):
so the Dan character. So in many ways, you could say that Dan is the main character, but really,
it's the story all revolves around Herbert West and his experiments. And so the science is really
fantastical. So I think that's why it's kind of not so much a science. I wouldn't really call it

(01:21:50):
a science fiction story. It's very much a horror film. It's very much typical of the kind of 80s
body horror. So there's lots of gore and dismembered limbs and blood. I think John Norland who did
the special effects and makeup effects, he said he went through so much more blood,

(01:22:12):
like I think it was like 12 times more blood than he's ever used on other productions. So it is
very much all about the effects of these experiments on the body. And so the reanimated corpses,
they're kind of like zombies and these very kind of violent inhuman monsters. And I was even listening

(01:22:33):
to an interview with Stuart Gordon and he talked about, you know, people talk about fast zombies
starting with 28 days later, but the violent acting reanimated corpses in Lovecraft Story and in
his film, they are quite, I guess you could call them kind of fast zombies, they're zombies, but
they're not kind of moving slowly. There are these really quite strong violent creatures.

(01:22:59):
One of the things that kind of comes up again and again as you're watching this story is like,
you're questioning why is Herbert doing this? He's not really driven by any desire to help people
at all. When you think about like with Frankenstein, like Victor Frankenstein,

(01:23:20):
he was kind of motivated by grief at the loss of his mother. And that kind of drives him to almost
like want to conquer death because he never wants to go through that grief again. Herbert West is
just like, I'm just going to do this just because I can. I mean, it's that whole thing of never thought
to think, you know, it's just that if we could, then we should, like, he doesn't, like Herbert West

(01:23:44):
doesn't care if we should. He's just like, can we do it? Okay, I'm going to do it. And there's no
like, oh, they've come back, but they're, you know, they're strong and violent and wrong, but
I'm not going to try and fix the formula to do any like he just keeps bringing things back from the
dead over and over. And with no trying to change the experiment in any way. No, it's the whole thing

(01:24:06):
of like, I guess it is the whole like what makes him a mad scientist, because isn't the definition
of insanity doing the same thing again expecting different results. Yeah. So it's like, he keeps
doing it. I'm like, you know that they're going to just act really violent. And it's yeah, it's not
about advancing any quality of life, because he's just bringing people back and animals back. And

(01:24:26):
it's not and they're coming back in this awful kind of violent state that it's the quality of life
that they have. Like, yeah, you can bring them back from the dead, but how awful is it their
existence? And it actually goes back to what I think about the source story and what what Lovecraft

(01:24:49):
was doing is that he has in many ways, Herbert West, I guess if you could say that he has a
philosophy, it's this whole idea of materialism, which is this idea that that matter is the
fundamental substance in nature. And so everything so mental states, consciousness, are all just

(01:25:10):
results of material interactions of material things. That is, they're basically that we are just
physical bodies, that there is no soul. So it is just about he's basically trying to keep the
mechanical and chemical processes in the body going. It doesn't matter that that that the, I
guess the person that this body used to be is that the personality is kind of no longer there for

(01:25:36):
me. For him, it's just like, I'm just figured out a way to keep these mechanical and chemical
processes in the body going. Just to go to the source novel. It does at the very beginning
encapsulate or describe West's point of view, which I think is still present in the film.
Gradually, I came to find Herbert West himself more horrible than anything he did.

(01:25:57):
That was when it dawned on me that his once normal scientific zeal for prolonging life
had subtly degenerated into a mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity and secret sense of charnel
picturesqueness. His interest became a hellish and perverse addiction to the repellently and
fiendishly abnormal. He gloated calmly over artificial monstrosities, which would make the

(01:26:18):
most healthy men drop dead from a fright and disgust. He became behind his pallid intelluctuality
a fastidious Baudelaire of physical experiments. A lot of it begins with these experiments on animals.
So we see in the film this awful kind of experiments that happen on poor Rufus in the

source story (01:26:40):
His views were widely ridiculed by the faculty and his fellow students,
hinged on the essentially mechanistic nature of life and concerned means for operating the
organic machinery of mankind by calculated chemical action after the failure of natural
processes. In his experiments with varying- various animating solutions, he had killed and

(01:27:01):
treated immense numbers of rabbits, guinea pigs, cats, dogs and monkeys till he had become the
prime nuisance of the college. Several times he had actually obtained signs of life in animals
supposedly dead, in many cases violent signs, but he soon saw that the perfection of this process,
if indeed possible, would necessarily involve a lifetime of research. Herbert West is just like,

(01:27:23):
yeah, just keep doing this process again and again and again to just keep doing it,
this very kind of long drawn out process of slowly, I guess, perfecting it.
He's kind of like a reverse serial killer. Like he starts out with cats and dogs and then moves
up to people, but he's bringing dead things back to life rather than killing them. Or does he kill
things just to bring them back to life? Yes, that's the thing. It's like she's killing them. And then,

(01:27:47):
yeah, so it's just like it is very much, I guess, just a mad obsession that he has, that to just
do it just because he can. And the whole idea that as in the story and in the film, he's separating
parts of the body and just reanimating parts of the body, like the whole thing of like decapitating
Dr. Hill in order to see if can you reanimate the head and the body. So again,

(01:28:16):
there's no reason as to why he would do this. Like there's no contribution to humanity or the world
by doing this. You're not making anything better. So I think that's why he's definitely a mad scientist
that he's just he's just he is just fucking nuts. And yeah, so the whole story is just a lot of the

(01:28:39):
story is just him doing things and then someone walks in and goes, what the hell is this? Yeah,
it's almost like a farce. Yeah, so it's a it's a very, very comical. And Stuart Gordon says that
he even thinks that the source story, there is a kind of humor to it all. Like there's a line in the
source story that's also used in the film where, you know, something goes, you know, terribly wrong

(01:29:05):
as every time Herbert West brings something back, it goes terribly wrong. And it's like, oh, well,
it just wasn't fresh enough. Next time. Yeah, yeah. So it just it just keeps he just keeps going.
And it was like, it's just not fresh enough. So yeah, he's just on this kind of mad quest. And he
does manage to bring Dan along with him. I think well, he does say to Dan at one point, well,

(01:29:30):
yeah, let's let's work on this together, because, you know, we'll become famous. And that's also when
Dr. Hill finds out what what West is doing. He also I think kind of is like, yeah, I want this
because I want to be famous. So it's it is totally this kind of selfish aim, that just to just to
be famous or just to just to do it. Yeah, just because they can. Well, that seems there's some

(01:29:53):
parallels there with the with Clive and Elsa from Splice that we talked about last episode.
And with, you know, Jessup, this is young scientists just going out there and being nuts.
And I guess just not thinking about the consequences, which I guess comes with when
the younger you are, it is definitely, yeah, you're not really thinking that far ahead. You just

(01:30:16):
want to you just want to make a name for yourself and just like, I yes, I am the best.
Well, you said there's a Stuart Gordon thought there was a strain of sort of comedy
within the story itself. But Lovecraft is not really known for his comedy is, you know, he's got
his short stories and his mythos and everything. So do you want to talk about Lovecraft and where

(01:30:38):
this fits in with all of that? Well, yeah, the source story was actually written as episodes
in a serial. So this was the first story that Lovecraft ever got paid for. He was paid $5 an
episode. And it was for the magazine called Homebrew, which I read was like a humor magazine.

(01:31:00):
But it was peered serially under the title gruesome tales and gruesome was spelled G R E W S O M E
gruesome. And the he took the work because yet basically to make money. But Lovecraft, he really
almost I guess you could say disowned this story because he thought it was hack,

(01:31:20):
hackery that he was it was like he was forced to do a lot of these almost like write stories for hire
basically to make more get to make money to make a living as a writer. And for him, the whole idea
of art was supposed to be this very lofty pursuit that you should do just for the the doing of it.

(01:31:42):
And that you shouldn't really have to think about money at all. And that was almost a degrading
part of it. So the the stories that he was like this one that he was just doing for money, he'd
kind of very much look down upon takes place over kind of several episodes. So as you're reading it
as one complete story, each episode, he has to keep recounting and resummarizing the story up to

(01:32:10):
that point. So the story actually takes place over about 16 years, which is different to the film
where the film is almost like I guess it's almost like over a few days, few days or whatever, it
all just escalates very quickly. Whereas in the story, it is this unnamed narrator, this poor guy
who just seems shackled to this crazy mad scientist in the source story. He keeps doing these experiments.

(01:32:38):
And like one of the first experiments, the subject kind of ends up going missing. And then
there's another experiment later on, which is it said at Miskatonic University, or it starts off
at Miskatonic University. And I believe this story is the first appearance of Miskatonic
University and Lovecraft's work. So one of the first few episodes is at the university and it's

(01:33:02):
this I think, basically like the Dean Halsey role, where there's actually a plague that happens and
he ends up dying and then West brings him back to life, but then he ends up escaping and is found
and is put into an asylum. So that also happens to Halsey in the film. He's put in like a padded

(01:33:29):
cell and then is used by Hill. It's interesting that throughout the story that there are instances
where the subjects escape. So through as it goes along, West is becoming increasingly paranoid.
It keeps saying that he often will look over his shoulder because he doesn't know if one of his
subjects will suddenly show up again and because they're always coming back violent, that they're

(01:33:53):
almost going to get their revenge. So it's similar to Frankenstein in a way, the whole idea that he's
worried that his creation will come back and kind of seek revenge. And yeah, as it goes along, he
starts just doing all these different experiments of reanimating different parts of bodies and then
connecting them, like making strange things, like connecting a hand to something else and

(01:34:16):
reanimating it. So it takes place over the course of 16 years, but one of the things that's also
mentioned is that Herbert West never seems to age. So there's this strange little aspect of it.
There's a lot of kind of Lovecraftian elements. Like the ending is different to the film, like

(01:34:36):
these strange beings almost come from somewhere and kind of take Herbert West away at the end of
the story. But what's different to a lot of Lovecraftian stories is that it actually is quite plot
driven, which is very different too. Because the whole thing with a lot of Lovecraftian tales is
that it is all about this dread and the vibes. Yeah, definitely. And that he often will have,

(01:35:04):
you know, just these strange, almost cosmic things that are happening that almost can't be
described or can't be visualized. So there's always been, you know, some difficulties with
adapting a lot of his work. And so a lot of his stuff is pretty much all published in pulp magazines.

(01:35:26):
So he doesn't really ever publish like novels. So he's working in this kind of area of weird
fiction mixed with some science fiction as well. But it's this science fiction mixed with this fear
and dread. And so there isn't any kind of, there isn't any supernatural elements in his,

(01:35:49):
in his works. I was reading, reading this essay by ST Joshi, that's an introduction
in a collection of short stories where he talked that they mentioned that it's not so much supernatural,
but the super normal that exists in Lovecraft's work. It's, you know, natural law is not defied,
but it's our conceptions of natural law that are, that are challenged. And so alongside that, you

(01:36:15):
know, there is that more kind of cosmic horror tales that he's probably more well known for,
like The Color Out of Space and The Call of Cthulhu. And there has this whole Cthulhu mythos
around that's kind of exists within his work. It's kind of a shared universe in a way. Like,
I mean, I don't know if characters crossover, but you know, it's all takes place within Arkham,

(01:36:38):
Massachusetts, Miskatonic University shows up a lot. And there's these elder gods that are always
circling around and manipulating events or kind of just there in the background and things, right?
They're deemed to be gods, but yet they're all, they're maybe also extraterrestrials.
Yeah, just extremely ancient beings. Yes. It's this interesting almost crossover between sci-fi

(01:36:59):
and horror because it's this ancient, these ancient beings, but then they might also be
extraterrestrial or like interdimensional from Joshi's introduction. He says this mythology,
Cthulhu mythology is also also been termed an anti mythology. And they write, whereas most of the
religions and mythologies in human history seek to reconcile human beings with the cosmos

(01:37:22):
by depicting a close benign relationship between man and God. Lovecraft's pseudo mythology brutally
shows that man is not the center of the universe, that the gods care nothing for him, and that the
earth and all its inhabitants are but a momentary incident in the unending cyclical chaos of the
universe. So yeah, that's got links to Altered States, if is what I was saying before about,

(01:37:45):
I think Jessup's journey is to be not the center of the universe. But there it's a much more hopeful and
kind of nice, whereas this is just, yeah, we're all in just in this unfeeling chaotic universe.
If there is something like these higher beings, then they don't give a shit about us. And I guess

(01:38:06):
that also connects further to, I guess, just Lovecraft's own feelings about other people.
It cannot be ignored, the really disgusting racism that exists across a lot of his works. Even in

(01:38:28):
Herbert West Reanimator, there's one experiment that happens with a Black boxer who's brought back
to life, and the description and the words used in this scene are just horrible. It's just really,
it's hideously racist. But yeah, he really was just against anything that wasn't like him.

(01:38:50):
So he was not a nice man. He lived in a time when you could say these things and nobody
batted an eyelid. And what's really great though is that now we're getting these newer works
that are confronting this aspect of Lovecraft. So we've got the great book Lovecraft Country by

(01:39:11):
Matt Roth and also the work of Victor Lavalel. So he's a Black American author. He did a really
great novella called The Ballad of Black Tom. And so it is, I guess, subverting a lot of Lovecraft's
work and this idea of cosmic horror and his mythology and kind of turning it on its head.

(01:39:35):
Lovecraft definitely has endured. And so there's something, there's something to that. But yeah,
it's always important to not just sweep all these untoward aspects of his work under the rug.
Do you want to talk about the making of Reanimator and its origins and how
it rose out of being a Lovecraft story to getting onto the screen?

(01:39:57):
Yeah, so it's directed by Stuart Gordon, who has adapted Lovecraft several times throughout his
filmography. And also he's in theatre. So he comes from theatre. He had the Organic Theatre Company,
which I believe was in Chicago. And they did a lot of strange experimental theatre that was almost

(01:40:24):
quite interactive. There was a tale of like one of his theatre productions where they would chain
up the doors so people couldn't leave. And so it was this kind of really
experimental forms of theatre, even with some of his productions, he would come out of the end

(01:40:47):
and ask the audience to kind of tell him what they thought. And he was totally fine with people just
kind of saying what they didn't like and asking for explanations as to why are you doing this.
And he even thought about doing an adaptation of Lovecraft for theatre. But then he also
started thinking about it being something that could at first he was thinking of adapting

(01:41:13):
Herbert West Reanimator for television. So he supposedly was talking to friends and he said
that there was there were too many Dracula films and he wanted a Frankenstein story. He thought
that there wasn't many of them around. And that's why he was told about Herbert Rest Reanimator,
the Lovecraft story. And at that point, it was a long out of print. So he had to go to the Chicago

(01:41:36):
Public Library and he had to request it. And six months later, he got so it's very different to
today where everything's just at our fingertips on the internet, whatever. He had to wait six months
for, I guess, the library to track a copy of it down. He talks about as he was reading it,
it was such an old copy that the pages were almost crumbling as he was reading it. And he

(01:42:01):
thought that this was a good story to adapt because it was in these episodes, because it was
serialised. His initial idea was to do a series of half hour episodes based on the story for PBS.
So it almost like Masterpiece Theatre or something, which is weird when you think about

(01:42:23):
the film that it ends up being, that he wanted to do it something kind of keeping with the period
setting. And maybe a bit more gritty and black and white. He found that, yeah, as half an hour
episodes that probably wasn't going to sell. So he thought maybe do it as hour long episodes
with the intention of using Organic theatre company actors. And they decided another way

(01:42:49):
to save money was to update it to the present day. So it was no longer a period story. Then
he started to meet with different people and he ended up meeting Brian Yuzna, who was the producer
and also a filmmaker in his own right, a director. And Yuzna thought that they both shared a love
of horror films and he was like, let's make this a horror film. Let's do it in Hollywood.

(01:43:15):
And over the course of a series of drafts, which were written by Dennis Paoli,
it became more of a comedy. Although, yeah, Gordon always thought that there was this funny kind of
aspect to the original story. So yeah, they ended up making the film. I don't think it was a huge
budget. And yeah, they had John Norland working on the special effects. The morgue, which is the focus

(01:43:41):
of a lot of the film, as one of the main settings where a lot of these reanimations take place,
they modeled it on the Cook County morgue. And they wanted, Gordon wanted it to look modern
and high tech because he didn't, he thought the whole thing of the old dark morgue was something

(01:44:01):
that had been so overdone. And so it is, it is, you know, a different aspect to this film
that it is this kind of more modern hospital morgue that I guess we're probably much more
familiar with. He even sent the two main actors, Jeffrey Coombes, who plays Herbert West and Bruce
Abbott, who plays Dan Cain to the LA morgue to kind of look, I guess, at the bodies. And because he

(01:44:27):
comes from a theater background, they had three weeks of rehearsal before shooting. So this was,
this was Stuart Gordon's first film, first feature film. And I believe Barbara Crampton, who plays
Meagan, it was also one of her, like her first film as well. And I think Jeffrey Coombes maybe

(01:44:50):
had been in a couple of things. And supposedly he was quite shocked by the script and didn't think
that anyone would see it. So he decided to do it. But yeah, he launched his career. Yeah, yeah.
They kind of does create almost like a company, like he comes from theater and he would have worked

(01:45:10):
with the same kind of theater company, troop of actors. And certainly, you know, Jeffrey Coombs
and Barbara Crampton are in a lot of his films moving forward. So he definitely, so there obviously,
there was a real camaraderie and good working relationships with them all because they,

(01:45:31):
none of the actors have anything bad to say about Stuart Gordon. Yeah. Yeah. And then if you think
about the things that especially poor Barbara Crampton has, you know, end up, you know, doing
and having or being put through in the film. It's interesting that you say that it was going to be
a TV show because I feel it feels like to me that it's a pilot to shoot, like it feels like a pilot

(01:45:53):
to a TV show. Like I would love, would have loved to have tuned in every week to watch Herbert
West go up against Dr Hill. And like, because it just, it does feel like they're setting up
a kind of ongoing story in a way out of all the great actors in there. I mean, you know, Jeffrey
Coombs, of course, who's a legend and, you know, character actor, just whenever he pops up, it's

(01:46:14):
always a joy. Barbara Crampton is, you know, the one of the ultimate screen queens. But who is the
actor who plays Dr Hill? I think he's phenomenal in this. And he's just obviously so up for it.
And just into it in a, in a weird way, or at least he's just so professional that he just, he brings
it. And is that, is he, is that a character from the story that is the same sort of fate as that?

(01:46:40):
Or is it? Yeah, so it's David Gale who plays Carl Hill. He's so good. So in the. He eats and leaves no
crumbs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he ate. Definitely. In many ways. Yeah. Yes. So in this, in the story,
there is the basically the Dean character who ends up being put in an asylum and seen as a crazy

(01:47:07):
person. And there is so in the source story, because it takes place over the course of several
years at so at one point, Herbert West and hit the unnamed narrator friend, end up getting involved in
well, becoming part of a medical team during World War Two. So this thing was, they say it's 1915.

(01:47:31):
So America hadn't joined the war. So I think they go with a Canadian, join the world war one,
World War One, sorry, in World War One, with the Canadian forces and go to Belgium.
And so under the guise of, you know, helping all the people who are being maimed and killed.
But of course, for Herbert West, this is just a laboratory. Yeah. And oh, God, it's like Hog Heaven

(01:47:58):
for him. Just all these. I feel like a kid in some kind of store. Yes. Yes. He is like a kid in the
candy store with and that's where he starts to reanimate just different parts and things. And
one of the person in command, I can't remember if he's in charge of like the medical team or
whether, but he is like a high ranking kind of officer. He ends up being killed. And then Herbert

(01:48:25):
West does try and bring back the head and the body just to see if you can do that and like the
whole, how would the body act? Will the body still kind of act like that its still part of that
person, even though they don't have the connection to the head? And it's this person that ends up,
that does like Carl Hill, start to kind of control the other reanimated corpses. And

(01:48:54):
in the story, these, a lot of these corpses, it's almost like it becomes an army. And it goes to the
asylum where the Dean was being kept and kind of release him. And then Herbert West becomes
convinced that they're coming, going to come and find him and enact their revenge. So there is kind

(01:49:16):
of a Carl Hill character in the original story that ends up, yeah, the body and they end up
basically this body with like, they put on like a fake head and the body starts to walk around, the body
is kind of controlling all the corpses. So there's definitely a Carl Hill character in the original

(01:49:37):
source novel, but they definitely take it in a really different direction in the film. There is
no Meagan character. There is hardly any women at all in any of Lovecraft stories, I don't think.
So they created the character of Meagan, who is the girlfriend of Dan. But it also seems like she

(01:50:00):
maybe is, I don't know if she's also studying to be a doctor, but they they're studying together.
So it's not quite clear what she is doing. She's the, she's the Dean's daughter. And there is this
whole thing that Carl Hill is obsessed with Meaghan. And so it leads to this very
notorious scene where he's controlled the Dean who is Meaghan's father to basically kidnap her and

(01:50:28):
bring her to him. And while he's there, his body is kind of holding his head. And of course,
there is the whole thing that she is stripped naked. And the head works its way down her body.
And it seems kind of poised in between her legs, where just as Dan and West burst in.

(01:50:53):
So it's this whole, it's become quite a notorious scene now of the kind of the head giving head.
Yeah. Yeah. Which, you know, it is, it is, you, you're watching, you're watching it now and you
do think, oh God, this is basically is a scene of kind of sexual assault. But it is, it is all just
part of this very over the top tone of the film that it somehow manages to get away with it.

(01:51:19):
It's so nuts. And it's like so wild and strange that it's like, yeah, it kind of gets, it does get
away with it, I think. And it becomes funny because it's so unbelievable. You can't believe they
actually went there. Yes. Yeah. In fact, Barbara Crampton says that her, she and Jeffrey Coombs
had a saying when it comes to Stuart Gordon that more is not enough. And so they were kind of talking

(01:51:46):
about, yeah, it's just the whole way of, of they really, it really does go as far as, as it can take
things. And that there is, there are a lot of like jokes throughout the film that, that kind of,
I guess break the tension. And it is a really, you know, good balance that Gordon manages to

(01:52:10):
strike with the between the horror and the comedy in the film. So what was the reception of the film
when it came out? So it was actually when they first, when they first assembled the film,
they realized that if they went to the MPAA, they were probably going to get an X rating because it
was just so full on. So at first they wanted to release it unrated, but because when, if something's

(01:52:37):
unrated, it doesn't get a lot of advertising, a lot of places won't show it. So they submitted a
re-edited version in 1986 that got an R rating from the MP, MPAA, which I was reading in one,
one place I was reading, they were saying that the R rated version is 93 minutes. But the version

(01:52:58):
that I've always watched that's available in the UK and also back in Australia is 86 minutes.
And I know, and I remember the video cover in Australia, because it was the whole thing in
Australia is that different states would, would give a rating. And there was a whole thing like
Queensland was really, really kind of conservative. And so I remember the cover of Reanimator has

(01:53:25):
said, Banned in Queensland! And so that was kind of the whole thing. I'm like, yeah, this is,
this is a really kind of full and it was rated R in Australia, which means that no one over the age
of 18 can watch it. Same as here, it's in the UK, it's got an 18 certificate. And it actually cut
out a lot, a subplot of Dr Hill of him hypnotizing different people and using his mind control.

(01:53:48):
And apparently there were even scenes in what is now referred to as the integral cut that runs 105
minutes and was released on the German Blu-ray. And in that apparently there is a scene where you see
Herbert West injecting the reagent into himself to kind of stay awake and to keep focus. And so
that might also explain why he goes so crazy as the film progresses. But it was when it came out,

(01:54:16):
it was surprisingly, you know, well received by genre fans, but also by serious critics. And you
mentioned Pauline Kael before she actually liked it. She called it Pop Bunuel, Roger Ebert liked it.
It won some prizes at different festivals, genre festivals. And I think it even run a particular,

(01:54:38):
I just read that it had won a special prize at Cannes. I don't know what in what context that was.
But yeah, it was, I think it's definitely become a cult classic. It's still endures today. There was
a musical version done for the stage in 2011. So yeah, I think at the time it was somewhat well

(01:54:59):
received. I'm sure there was a lot of, there were probably some people where it was too much. And I
believe some Lovecraft purists were not happy with the differences. But yeah, it's still.
Yeah, it's still, it still has a big following today. Like even just talking to some of my students,

(01:55:20):
a couple of my students have brought it up to me that because I would think like, especially,
you know, the head giving head scene, that would be too much, you know, for like a Gen Z audience,
you know, the stereotype is that they want to cancel everything. But no, a lot of them really
love this film. Yeah. And I guess, you know, if it's in its durability also brought about, and dare

(01:55:44):
we talk about the two sequels that Brian Yuzna made, which were the law of diminishing
returns in every way. Because I think the Bride of Reanimator came out a few years after. And then
there was Beyond Reanimator, which was like 2003. Yeah, Jeffrey Coombs is like the only returning
actor for all of it, I think. No, Dr. Hills in the second one, isn't it? And Dan, Dan is in the

(01:56:07):
second one. And what I was interesting, so the second one is Bride of Reanimator. And it makes me
think a lot about Bride of Frankenstein, because in the in Reanimator, you have Dan and Megan,
kind of the central couple, and West is kind of interrupting that. And in the second film, it's,

(01:56:30):
it opens and Dan and Herbert West are actually in a war zone, aren't they? And they're a medical
team. So maybe a nod to the source story where they go head out into a war. But it just made me
think of in Bride of Frankenstein, you have Victor Frankenstein, who's just got married. But then

(01:56:52):
but then he is visited by his old kind of mentor, Professor Dr. Pretorius. And the whole thing in
Bride of Frankenstein is that of those this almost quite overt kind of queer subtext, Dr. Pretorius
is a very kind of camp figure. And that he's taking Victor Frankenstein, although he's actually

(01:57:17):
called he's not called Victor in the films. I think he's Henry Frankenstein in the films.
He takes Henry away from his wife, basically pretty much on their wedding night, takes him away to
continue his experiments. And the whole thing is that they, the two men together create the bride.

(01:57:38):
And it's almost like they become like this, this kind of family, this family unit or this couple.
And I think that in the Bride of Re-Animator what shocked me was that Dan and Herbert were
like a couple now. They were like an old married couple had been together for years.
And then they create the bride.
All right, do we want to move on to some honorable mentions? Yes, yes. So what's that with you?

(01:58:15):
What are some nutty professors? Well, I was I mentioned before that John Lilley and Edward
Jessup reminded me of Walter Bishop, the character from the TV series Fringe, which I really,
really like, played by he's played by John Noble. And he basically the first episode they find he's
in an asylum. So he's literally a mad scientist. And then he uses a sensory deprivation tank in

(01:58:39):
order for the hero Olivia Dunham to access information. I think they even use, yeah,
they use a sensory deprivation tank a lot in that show. And it's very much talks about all his
experiments in the 70s, 60s and 70s. And how he yeah, he's very much a bit like the John Lilly

(01:59:00):
character. And also, you don't see much of in the show, but his partner was William Bell,
played by Leonard Nimoy, who is the sort of the not the villain, but the guy who's going around
doing all these experiments that I think they even say the world was his laboratory.
And sort of hit all his experiments and the fallout from them or what the fringe team are

(01:59:21):
going to have to try and rectify. And also his and William Bell's offside or who kind of who runs
his company while he's away is played by Blair Brown from Altered States. So there's, I think
they very much take Altered States as a as something as an influence in that show.
So yeah, that and also I have to bring up X files because I have to all the time. And I was

(01:59:48):
actually thinking what it's what episode has a nutty professor in it or a mad scientist.
And I was thinking thinking I even went back to the episode guide and was looking through.
And there's really other than The Postmodern Prometheus, which I talked about last episode,
there's only really one that I that really stood out to me that I could really remember. And that

(02:00:08):
is from the first season. And that's the episode Eve, which has which is about a woman who a geneticist
to which I could have even brought this up in the last episode as well about who basically
makes clones of herself and they're homicidal. And it's about these two little girls that they
think the agents think are victims, but they're actually they're actually trying to get back

(02:00:30):
to their original the original professor to become some kind of twisted family. And they
they kill they basically kill their own fathers while living across the country from each other.
So they kind of know they exist, even though they don't have never seen each other before.
It's a very strange and very creepy episode. Yes. So for me, the one film that really came to mind

(02:00:53):
and I was almost going to do this instead of Reanimator is the 1969 film Horrors of Malformed
Men directed by Teruo Ishii. So it's a Japanese film. And it is such a wild, crazy, incredible film.
It's just the clash of all these different stylistic elements. It's about a medical student

(02:01:19):
and it's based on a story by Edogawa Rampo, who is kind of like the Japanese Edgar Allan Poe.
And his name was referencing Edgar Allan Poe quite directly. And he did these very strange,
weird tales. It's taking a lot of Rampo stories and kind of mixing them together.
So it's about a medical student, but he has amnesia. He's trapped in an insane asylum,

(02:01:46):
even though he seems to be perfectly sane. He escapes. He's framed for a murder. And he ends
up seeing a photo of a man that looks exactly like him. And so he assumes this dead man's identity.
And he goes to a nearby island where this person's father is. And he goes to the island

(02:02:14):
and discovers that this the father of the man whose identity he's taken is trying to build an
ideal community where he transforms people into these strange, hideous freaks. So kind of like
Dr. Moreau. And the film, I guess that's giving you a narrative, but the film just goes into

(02:02:41):
some wild, crazy places. And there's scenes where it's all in not black and white, but negative,
or but then also pink. There is all sorts of transgressive stuff. The kind of the mad scientist
figure who's creating these freaks moves in this very stylized way that's taking from like traditional,

(02:03:08):
it's taking from just traditional Japanese theater forms. So it's and to play the character,
they got an actor who was who was trained in this particular style. So he has these very, very odd
movements. So it's just such a great film. And I can't think of anything else like it. So definitely

(02:03:28):
Horrors of Malformed Men, if you've never seen it before, I highly recommend it. I think I even
caught when I saw it, I called it the island of Dr. Moreau on bath salts, because it's just so wild.
All right, what does your honourable mention? So I watched I thought of this one watching
Altered States. And so I watched it again recently, a film that I always really enjoyed. And I'd love

(02:03:49):
it even more now having watched it after a few years away from it. And that's Ang Lee's Hulk from 2003.
Now bear with me. I think I don't know if it's Altered States as a direct influence,
but there are a lot of similarities in this version of the incredible Hulk that Ang Lee did.
This is in the period like just up just as the first Spider-Man movie came out, there was no MCU,

(02:04:15):
they were just throwing stuff at the wall and Ang Lee was like, I'll do a Hulk movie. And it is just
the weirdest, most interesting superhero movie to come out of that period. Maybe of all the of
all the superhero films that have ever come out, especially because it's Ang Lee doing something
different. It's an auteur at work, making this a very emotional, metaphoric movie. And so in this

(02:04:39):
version of Hulk, the nutty professor that is actually Nick Nolte's character, who's the father of Bruce
Banner in this film, who does experiments in the 60s on an army base where he, like Lilley, he does
and like Jessup, he does experiments on himself. And he's trying to create this new genetic toxin

(02:04:59):
or what have you to make a better soldier or make a new change physiology. So he tests on him,
he gets told no human subjects. So he tests it on himself. And then his wife gets pregnant and he
passes on the things that he's done to his body with this, with his experiments are passed on to

(02:05:20):
his son, who then we could, you know, later on in life, he's older, played by Eric Bana.
And he's completely emotionally shut off from and his girlfriend, played by Jennifer Connolly,
is Betty Ross is always complaining to him that he's shut off emotionally. He's like Jessup. He
doesn't, he's into the science and to his experiments, he's not into human relationships.

(02:05:42):
But then due to an experiment, he gets bombarded with gamma radiation. And of course, that turns
him into the Hulk. But the thing is, is he already had the sort of genetic, the experiments done by
his father, it was passed on to him, he already had the ability to turn into the Hulk inside him.
But it was this gamma radiation that has unleashed. Because, but now he's a weak man,
a weak bodied man with, who was emotionally shut off. But then when he opens up his emotions,

(02:06:05):
he becomes this giant hulking monster. It's the Jekyll and Hyde. And I think there's, yeah,
there's a lot of similarity. And there's all these strange hallucinatory scenes in the film of lots
of dream sequences, where it's like dreams seem to unlock these abilities and things like that.
And it's only at the end, he has this, and like Jessup, there's all this baggage and trauma that

(02:06:30):
he needs to sort of get over and unlock within himself in order to sort of win the day, I suppose,
you could say. And it's only at the end, when he faces the trauma that he's been locking behind,
they even use the imagery of a locked door in his mind. And when he first opens it in his mind,
he sees the Hulk there. And then later on, when he realizes what he needs to get over his trauma,

(02:06:51):
that's when he can actually come into his own power and becomes the superhero. So I think it's
extremely, and also because of his trauma is linked to his childhood, when he becomes the Hulk,
he basically becomes the four year old child that this trauma happened to. So all he wants to
do when he's the Hulk is he wants to go out into the desert and look at flowers. And then the military
come along and try to kill him. So then of course, he starts breaking tanks in half. And I just think

(02:07:15):
that all the emotional heavy lifting that the movie does, it really pays off in the end. And I
think it's extremely interesting film. And Nick Nolte is amazing, so unhinged in this movie. He's
amazing. Okay, okay, maybe maybe I need to give it another go because I was one of the many who
I always refer to as Marvel's Oedipus, I just thought it was maybe two on the nose in many

(02:07:37):
ways. I need to give it. But it's melodramatic. It's so it's a very soap, but it's it's I think
it works. I think it actually like it when he's when he is the Hulk, like there are emotional
stakes. And that he's this. Yeah, and it's all about like the unlocking of the unraveling of
trauma and facing it. And so by the end, he can become the Hulk whenever he wants because he's

(02:07:58):
not repressed anymore. And that's very much what a lot of films are about today. Everything is
always about trauma. So from a new from a contemporary lens, it might it might because
like Jessup at the end, he gets in touch with his emotions. Okay, all right. All right. I'll give it
another go. Well, my next pick will be a another crazy. Well, I think it's from the 70s, not the 60s

(02:08:22):
film called The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osborne directed by a Walerian Borowczyk.
So we've we've mentioned Jekyll and Hyde several times throughout this episode. So I can't so I
wanted to pick at least pick my favourite adaptation of that story. And Borowczyk in this film, you

(02:08:44):
have the Jekyll and Hyde story. But as the title suggests, and it was also known as Dr. Jekyll and
His Women. There is this this female character, his his fiance, who's who's very much central to
the story as well. So you have Jekyll. It's been a few years since I've watched it. But I just

(02:09:06):
remember the first time I ever watched this film. I was just so taken away by the imagery and the
eroticism of the film. And the when when Jekyll turns into Hyde, he actually goes into this bath.
So it's kind of like the isolation tank, maybe going into water and then he and then suddenly

(02:09:31):
Hyde comes out and it's this different actor. And the actor that they get to play Hyde is just
weird, really weird looking guy. And I just found him really quite terrifying. But
as this the story goes on, it becomes very much about like Miss Osborne, she also it kind of ends up

(02:10:00):
turning somewhat like Altered States. It it ends with with the couple kind of coming together
coming together. But in this film, it's they're both regressed to this primal state, and they're
going to stay there. And it's a very liberating thing. And Borowczyk was working a lot in this

(02:10:25):
this area of what you might call erotic horror. He did also the film The Beast, which is this
adaptation in a sense of the Beauty and the Beast. He just imbues the whole thing with this weird
dreaminess. And I remember yeah, after the first time I saw it, not long afterwards, I ended up

(02:10:45):
having a dream that was like the film. And then afterwards, I couldn't remember what was in the
film and what was in my dream. So it really did burn into my number on you into my subconscious.
And so it just it yeah, I can almost I almost can't separate it from this strange dream that I had
about it as well. So I really, really love that film. All right, on that note. Yeah. Episode two in

(02:11:11):
the bag - in the medical bag. All right, so tune in next time we're going to we're going to continue
looking at the the legacy of Frankenstein and Mad Science films. Yeah. And so in the meantime,
you can find us on Instagram, Facebook and on Letterboxd. And you can email us at
scifrightspodcast@gmail.com. Let us know about your favourite mad scientist films. If

(02:11:37):
you think there's anything we missed or anything you disagree with, feel free to drop us a line.
Let us know how we're doing and even suggest few films that we might talk about in the future,
or even themes or seasons we're open, we take requests. Till next time. Goodbye. Bye bye.

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