Throw every abstract color in its most vibrant iteration, esoteric mysticism, and pagan symbolism into a hurricane and wait for landfall. When it descends on the shore, pigmented scraps of chaotic ephemera and symbols will be strewn about the beach. After clearing up and categorizing the havoc they’ll christen the hurricane ‘The Holy Mountain’.

For the uninitiated this is but a glimpse into the maddening creativity and radical vision with which Holy Mountain was conceived. The idiosyncratic, experimental, and hallucinatory sets are akin to a visual assault. The result? The aftershock of a storm: we feel awakened, raw, yet mysteriously exposed.

The visual iconography and aesthetic terrain of Holy Mountain are overwhelming, perhaps dizzying at first glance. Kevin Fermini noted that ‘the amount of subtext imbued in every frame immediately established Jodorowsky as a genius’. On second, third, fourth viewing it becomes clear that our Holy Mountain represents a landscape richly penetrated by dreamscapes, social discontent, and the ravings of LSD. Symbols serve as a conduit: occult and hermetic passageways to some hard and eternal truths about human nature, modernity, and the unholy triad of profit, profit, profit.

The Holy Mountain presents us a universe not unfamiliar from our own. In this world everything is unholy, and the sacred becomes profane. But what else is new? We make idols of tropes, legends, consumption but we completely objectify humanity. Everything is commodified, even misery, and nothing has any autonomous, intrinsic value.

Jodorowsky was a founding member of the short lived Panic Movement, a surrealist collective with the objective of incorporating visually violent iconography into their artistic work. The avant garde Panic Movement sought to capture the underground spirit of the original Surrealist movement, and bring it back to the depths. Holy Mountain certainly accomplished their founding objective: the film is undoubtedly a disconcerting visual assault. Beneath the familiar religious and hermetic tropes, there is a layer of radical nihilism to the spectacle of shapes, colors, and patterns: lacking a discernible mechanism through which to decode the films more opaque symbolism, we are left to simply experience the raw chaos of sensation in its purest form.

Though deeply visually entrancing and startlingly original, it never descends into polemic, or a filmmaker’s self-indulgent play thing. There is a visual and thematic clarity that saves the film from being an extended, disjointed nightmarescape. Jodorowsky’s vision as a director mirrors that of the Alchemist he plays in the film: he seeks to cleanse us of our illusions and broker a confrontation between ourselves and the truth hidden behind the (densely colored) veil.

These are six reasons why The Holy Mountain is the surreal and maddeningly weird aesthetic experience you need, if you have the nerve of course.