Cosmic Horror and Acidic Apocalypse from the American Counterculture: The Psychedelic Gothic in Cinema and Beyond

Summary

Tobe Hooper's film Eggshells, shot in 1969, reflects the growing pessimism of the American counterculture during a turbulent historical period. The film employs psychedelic aesthetics and Gothic themes to explore the moral decay and social disintegration within the counterculture movement. It exemplifies a cultural mode termed the Psychedelic Gothic, which merges psychedelic visuals with cosmic horror to reveal deeper truths about the sixties' impact on American society. This genre highlights the unsettling aspects of a movement often romanticized in cultural memory.

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Abstract

Tobe Hooper, the Texan filmmaker whose work defined the horror genre and the Gothic in cinema, shot his first feature film, Eggshells, in 1969. It was a tumultuous and consequential year in American history, with Vietnam antiwar protests raging across the country, myriad hippie communes staging an unprecedented social experiment, and a series of highly symbolic events (the Manson family murders, Days of Rage, Altamont, etc.) putting the final nails in the coffin of sixties utopianism. It was moments before, in Hunter S. Thompson’s words, “the wave finally broke and rolled back” (31).Hooper’s Eggshells is an experimental, nonnarrative film that presents the life of four young hippies living together in a house in the woods. The film mirrors the subjective experience of a psychedelic trip through techniques such as kaleidoscopic color patterns and superimpositions. At the same time, it cultivates a lingering atmosphere of dread rooted in a Lovecraftian “crypto-embryonic hyper-electric presence” (Hooper qtd. in Degiglio-Bellemare 96) that inhabits the house’s basement and eventually turns the hippies into blood and vapor.Considering its historical context, Eggshells can be said to express the American counterculture’s increasing pessimism and unease—feelings that would coalesce into a dark mood pervading the entire nation in the seventies and reverberate up to the present day. This essay proposes that Eggshells exemplifies an untheorized yet significant branch of the American Gothic tradition: the Psychedelic Gothic. It is argued that this cultural mode emerging in the mid-sixties fuses psychedelic aesthetics, countercultural motifs, and cosmic horror to reveal deeper truths about the decade and its enduring impact on the American soul. It is interpreted as an intuition that the counterculture’s utopian aspirations masked a moral disintegration and weakening of social cohesion. The Psychedelic Gothic is thus seen as the product of a society grappling with the limits of liberation and the collapse of meaning during and after a seismic cultural revolution.Eggshells is one among a number of films made between the late sixties and mid-seventies that invoke distinctly Gothic moods and themes through psychedelic aesthetics and either directly emerge from or allude to sixties counterculture. Notable examples include Roger Corman’s innovative representation of sixties psychedelia The Trip (1967), Daniel Haller’s early Lovecraft adaptation The Dunwich Horror (1970), and Kenneth Anger’s stylized proclamation of a new occult age Lucifer Rising (1972). This mode would fade into the background by the mid-seventies, but its aesthetics and themes would periodically reappear in later works. But what exactly unites this body of films?From the perspective of style and form, films of the Psychedelic Gothic are characterized by any combination of visual excess (e.g., vivid colors, flashing lights, abstract geometric shapes, superimpositions); atmospheric sound and music; temporal and narrative disjunction; subjective camerawork; chaotic symbolism (e.g., juxtaposition of an om and a pentagram); and representations of lust, violence, and metaphysical themes, such as ontological uncertainty (e.g., in the form of hallucinations or nested realities). Furthermore, the films feature objects, icons, events, or environments at least loosely associated with sixties counterculture. The Trip, for example, presents a young director’s LSD trip taking place in the sixties Los Angeles drug scene. Mirroring an actual psychedelic experience, the film’s events shatter linear time and jump back and forth between different realities. They feature hallucinations of kaleidoscopic patterns, surreal scenes of dark magic, and intense, drug-fueled intercourse.However, not all films of the Psychedelic Gothic fully transport the viewer into the psychic realm, relying instead on narration and spectatorial inference. Therefore, the formal template of the mode is best conceived of as a spectrum between two poles: affective-immersive presentation of psychedelic experience and narrative representation of countercultural signifiers. The films can be located anywhere on the spectrum, but never completely discard one aspect for the other. The Psychedelic Gothic equally permits a conventional, narrative depiction of the counterculture from without, an affective portrayal of altered states from within, or a display fusing both elements. Within this formal schema, the typical spectatorial experience can be described as follows.On the level of embodied perception, the spectator can experience sensory overload, perceptual disorientation, sublime awe, bodily revulsion, and immersion in a dense atmosphere of the uncanny. Frequently, the films combine a psychedelic dissolution of ordinary experiential boundaries—primarily between psyche and world—with a terrifying, uncanny presence of “a hidden and concealed intentionality, a threatening power pervading the vicinity” (Fuchs 105). One senses that invisible and malevolent forces are in control, which can cause “shuddering, quaking, or shivering, in which something ‘cold runs down one’s back’” (Fuchs 104). This uncanny atmosphere is often merged with entities prompting scare and disgust, and amplified to such an extent that the spectatorial experience veers into cosmic horror.1On the level of mental cognition, the spectator is invited to recognize persons, practices, or environments as countercultural and make negative associations and value judgments. This is facilitated by tropes, like the “Satanic Hippie” who commits gruesome acts of violence, manifests madness and delusion, and partakes in occult rituals. For example, The Dunwich Horror features a scene in which the female protagonist experiences a hallucinatory nightmare. She encounters a group of freakish figures in colorful rags, their bodies smeared with paint and tribal symbols, dancing ritualistically and engaging in an orgy with a sinister, echoing laughter. For those familiar with the sixties, the scene immediately recalls the hippie movement’s intoxicated sexual experiments in service of expanding consciousness.By associating counterculture and its markers with notions, such as moral decay or occultism, one is invited to think of the movement and/or its characteristic elements (e.g., drug taking, sexual promiscuity) as a destructive force in society. However, such mental operations are never divorced from affective experience, so the associations are conditioned by the film’s impact on the senses and vice versa. A dynamic intertwinement of these experiential layers is what makes for the aesthetics of the Psychedelic Gothic in cinema.Though the term has yet to be fully theorized, the Psychedelic Gothic bears great cultural and philosophical significance. If the American Gothic is indeed a “moral valve” and “state of mind” that acts as a “visual barometer and diagnosis of . . . the nation’s moods” (Faflak and Haslam 19), then its psychedelic mode would have a lot to say about the ramifications of sixties counterculture. Although several critiques have been formulated already,2 Western cultural memory is still populated by rosy images of a “hip” and radically liberatory social movement. However, a deeper look not only nuances this myth, but shatters it completely. By way of definition, what we refer to as “sixties counterculture” was composed of those affluent and educated middle-class youths who “turned inward” and resorted to a politics of consciousness to rebel against the established order. They formed nominally egalitarian communes, seeking to develop a new mindset through a hedonistic lifestyle and “small-scale tools,” such as psychedelics and rock music (Turner 30–31).There were a number of major issues with the countercultural movement. To begin with, its members adopted an apolitical, anything-goes ethos celebrating transgression and experimentation without clear aims. They sought to completely withdraw from bourgeois society, yet they relied on its structures—most importantly consumer capitalism—to maintain their cultural milieu (Zimmerman 5–7). The counterculture’s seductive pluralism, collaboration with mass media and the music industry,3 and promotion of Eastern mysticism without its politico-ethical content,4 quickly made it “a marketable carnival where everyone had free reign to ‘do his own thing’” (171–73). As this sensibility became diffused and amplified by the media, the kind of violence and sinister delusion embodied by Charles Manson easily seeped into the counterculture (165). Therefore, owing to its values, or rather the lack thereof, the movement started to decay from within at the very start of its existence.Moreover, contrary to popular myth, counterculturalists were not at all opposed to technology. In fact, they “not only failed to exorcise the modern world of technology and materialism but, rather, deliberately naturalized it” (Zimmerman 10). The counterculture developed a shared worldview that Simon Sadler calls “hippie holism” (118), integrating mysticism, primitivism, and craft with ideas from the interdisciplinary field of cybernetics. Cybernetics emerged from Cold War military-industrial research in the United States and marked a massive paradigm shift in science. Its groundbreaking conceptual innovation was reimagining the material world “as a single, interlinked pattern of information,” enabling scientists to see any facet of reality—nature, society, technology, even consciousness—as a computable system of signs, data, and code (Turner 5).Surprisingly, many hippies adopted the cybernetic paradigm and conceived of the world as an interconnected whole composed of different informational systems constantly interacting with each other (Sadler 119).5 Based on this vision, counterculturalists began to consider technologies (e.g., strobe lights, amplifiers, and psychedelic drugs) as instruments capable of tuning every individual consciousness to reality’s hidden patterns of information.6 Social and political change for them would sprout not from violent protest, but from a radical transformation of the self relying on a “technology-induced experience of togetherness” (Turner 4). As such, “hippie holism” did not merely tolerate technology; it subsumed it under a broader metaphysical vision, wherein tools once built for control and surveillance could be repurposed for liberation and the cultivation of higher awareness. Sixties counterculture thus not only propagated a questionable non-ethics, but also showed an eerie compatibility with the American military-industrial-academic complex.These issues are all reflected metaphorically in the Psychedelic Gothic. Films within this mode began to appear around 1966, when decay and internal contradictions were likely becoming obvious within the countercultural movement. The ugly events of 1969 signaled the end of sixties counterculture. However, its ideas and practices lived on in not just American society but the entire Western world, while cultural memory preserved it in the form of myths and icons. In this context, the Psychedelic Gothic can be interpreted as a memory and an intuition that there was something vaguely sinister about the countercultural project. The mode would show the uncanniness and horror of transgressing all boundaries set by consciousness and society.The technology-driven, psychedelic, and Gothic breakdown of stable structures and rationality in consciousness would birth a uniquely postmodern terror: the disintegration of personal identity, linear time, moral order, and any firm distinction between mind and world. When the mind loses intelligibility and becomes merely “the systemic relation between elements, information, function and communication” (Iuli 227), the human element is rendered irrelevant and exposed to invisible systems of control. This is how the countercultural experiment becomes strangely collusive with state power and technological governance, an intuition that is also present in the Psychedelic Gothic: sometimes, the hippies are portrayed as participating in shadowy conspiracies involving the U.S. government.7To summarize the argument, the Psychedelic Gothic is worth studying as a manifestation of the American Gothic with unique cultural and philosophical relevance. The mode captures the watershed moment when the American mind experienced a psychedelic breakdown of meaning, birthing the postmodern condition that eventually engulfed the entire world. It frames sixties counterculture not as a utopian movement, but rather as a Gothic apocalypse, in the original Greek sense of apokalypsis as disclosure—a truth-event unveiling the horror of dissolving the human mind into a sea of informational noise. Aldous Huxley, the prophet of sixties psychedelia, writes in The Doors of Perception that circumventing the brain’s “reducing valve” through psychedelics produces an empowering spiritual awareness of the “Mind at Large” (24). The Psychedelic Gothic, however, warns us that this process can also lead to an ontological crisis and vulnerability to technological control.By way of conclusion, it is worth gesturing at a canon of films belonging to the Psychedelic Gothic. It would be productive to distinguish a core canon and a canon of recurrences. The former would include films such as Aleph (Bergman, 1966), The Trip (Corman, 1967), Psych-Out (Rush, 1968), Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968), Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969), Invocation of My Demon Brother (Anger, 1969), Eggshells (Hooper, 1969), The Dunwich Horror (Haller, 1970), Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (Hancock, 1971), Lucifer Rising (Anger, 1972), Messiah of Evil (Huyck and Katz, 1973), and Race with the Devil (Starrett, 1975).8 Meanwhile, the latter would consider films like Altered States (Russell, 1980), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Gilliam, 1998), Beyond the Black Rainbow (Cosmatos, 2010),9Inherent Vice (Anderson, 2014), and Mandy (Cosmatos, 2018). Overall, the Psychedelic Gothic opens multiple avenues for future research,10 offering a rich lens for examining the cultural and ontological aftermath of the sixties.ENGAGEMENTS: Have thoughts about this column? American Gothic Studies invites responses to this and other essays published in the journal in the form of Engagements. These short pieces (250–1000 words) are meant to encourage dialogue between writers for and readers of American Gothic Studies. They should respond to an article, interview, provocation, or exhumation published in a prior issue of the journal. They can be complimentary, critical, supplemental, or some combination of the three. Engagements should be submitted through the submission portal on the American Gothic Studies website. Please use the same formatting instructions as for journal articles. If you have questions, please contact the section editor, Christina Connor, at cconnor@hccfl.edu.

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