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Taking Woodstock

20 Jun

It’s been a week since the Daily Psychedelic Video has been hacked by a hacker who thought that destroying this psychedelic web-site would be a good way of expressing his views regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Anyway, we are now back, with a new group of editors to bring you psychedelc videos and with this exquisite psychedelic scene out of Ang Lee’s taking woodstock.

To my mind, this is probably the best cinematic representation of the psychedelic experience. It is very delicate and gives tremendous amount of attention to the little details so that to me it is clear that whoever created it knew a thing or two about the psychedelic experience. The scene (the trip starts of at 3:20) pays a lot of attention to the slow changes in perception, the changing of colors and the orgasmatic feelings in the body.

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Alexander Jodrowsky’s Holy Mountain

11 Jun

Alexander Jodrowsky is a genius. Both as a film maker as well as an esoteric thinker and writer. His 1973 Holy Mountain is nothing short of a masterpiece. Highly psychedelic, highly bizarre and and highly revelatory. Check it out.

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Jack Black’s mushroom trip

7 Jun

Jack Black picks some magic mushrooms in a forest and goes into a wild trip. From “Pick of Destiny”.

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Dumbo the psychedelic elephant

1 Jun

This famous excerpt from Disney’s Dumbo (1941) is arguably one of the first psychedelic scenes  ever.

The relations between Disney and psychedelics are not clear. According to Peter Stafford’s “Psychedelic Encyclopedia” the chief visualist for Disney’s Fantasia (1940)  participated  in the mescaline experiments conducted in Germany by Kurt Beringer in the 1920’s.  Artist Paul Laffoley claims that Disney himself experimented with Mescaline “On a regular basis” during his stay in Germany in the 1930’s. Many other theories regarding the relations between Disney and psychedelics exist, and you can find out about some of them here in this fascinating article.

In this particular scene, Dumbo drinks from a bucket and slowly begins hallucinating. He sees pink elephants which appear before him out of thin air, and start dancing and singing (This sequence starts around the 3rd minute). By the fifth minute Dumbo’s fantasy world becomes increasingly psychedelic as the pink elephants change shape and colors. It seems the bucket has been spiked.

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‘Altered States’ Trip

29 May

The zenith of a mind blowing psychedelic trip. This one is from the incredible movie “Altered States” directed by Ken Russell (1981). The film is loosely based on the pioneering work of isolation tanks pioneer John Lilly, who was also a sedulous psychonaut and conducted some of the world’s most interesting psychedelic research of his time by using psychedelic drugs in combination with lengthy periods of isolation inside isolation tanks – a practice sure to arouse some hyper-psychedelic results.  This particular clip is saturated with esoteric and symbolic content, some of it rather dark in nature, however I find it to be very revealing.

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The Love-Ins

17 May

“The hippies’ freedom and their strange ideas are attracting national attention”. Amusing 1967 psychedelically styled trailer for the movie The Love-Ins which prominently features a character obviously based on Dr. Timothy Leary. Like other mainstream films about psychedelics from the era, at the end it all comes down to: Acid will ruin you, and even Dr. Leary gets a pretty straightforward admonition in the film.

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1001 Nights – Yoshitaka Amano

13 May


“Anything Yoshitaka Amano is perfect for tripping.” says Erika Hsu who sent me this link, and judging from what I see, I can certainly believe that. This one is part of the short movie 1001 nights. Beautiful dreamscape.

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Go Speed Racer go!

11 May

The Wachowsky brothers’ Speed Racer failed as a movie, but was arguably one of the greatest achievements of psychedelic aesthetics in the the history of cinema. The “Go Speed Racer Go” song clip is just stunning.

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