What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?/Film

Animation

 * We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story, while having already made the Nightmare Fuel page, also looks as if it had been written and produced on several drug trips. To quote That Guy With The Glasses as Raoul Puke, "This is 'Land Before Time' on crystal meth."
 * Fantasia. Cossack-dancing flowers? Water-carrying brooms? Ballerina hippos?! A black demon atop a mountain?!? An animator (responsible for dancing mushrooms) stated the only drugs he took were "Ex-Lax and Feenamint", two laxative drugs.
 * Disney's later and lesser known film The Three Caballeros makes Fantasia look positively mundane in comparison.
 * Both of these films, along with Alice in Wonderland (unsurprisingly) became popular "trip movies" during The Sixties. This did nothing to help their reputations. It sure hasn't hurt their reputations either.
 * Fantasia is drugs. Synaesthesia, visuals, sounds, dancing mushrooms, evolution, the works.
 * Not just whole movies, but certain scenes in other movies are guilty of this, too, including the "Pink Elephants On Parade" scene in Dumbo or the "Heffalumps and Woozles" scene in The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.
 * Jan Svankmajer, a Czech surrealist artist, is known for making incomprehensible to rather disturbing films.
 * Heavy Metal is essentially a series of loosely connected and animated sequences that frequently get extremely trippy.
 * This is actually a subversion of the trope. While creators of the animated feature may not have been involved in any sort of drug use, the authors of much of the original source material—multiple stories from Heavy Metal Magazine—certainly were; and drug use features prominently in parts of the film.
 * Coraline.
 * Ralph Bakshi's Wizards. The last big battle scene involves mutant and demon Nazis fighting war-harded Elves and Fairies set on a crazy rotoscoped background, and all the while set to jazz rock.
 * Felix the Cat: The Movie.
 * The transitions in The Adventures of Tintin are quite trippy, but the movie itself isn't.
 * One has seen Igor as this. While the characters look like they had too much crack, their dialog hardly made any sense.
 * Shark Tale and its premise is this. The main character's face even looks like the the recent variation of Pac-Man on crack.
 * Yellow Submarine. Particularly the Sea of Time/Monsters/Holes/Phrenology/Holes sequences.
 * In his book Up Periscope Yellow, Al Brodax, the man behind the production, who wrote or co-wrote most of the non-musical sequences, swears the only time he ever had drugs was in a meeting with John Lennon after he'd finished the script.
 * In the behind-the-scenes portions of the DVD, it's revealed that while the animators never did drugs, they would often return to work a little drunk after having a few too many pints during their lunch break.
 * The Nightmare Before Christmas. The film begins going inside a tree. The opening music number alone shows off some freaky looking characters. Including a clown who can tear his own face off and vanish in a puff of smoke.

Live Action
""Imagine a science-fiction film where the entire special effects budget was spent on cocaine.""
 * The Wizard of Oz: There's a scene where Dorothy falls asleep due to magical poppies only to be woken by magical snow, for heaven's sake! The depressant opium is made from poppies, from which we get sedatives such as heroin and morphine. "Magical snow" is presumably a reference to the stimulant cocaine. The original book was written in 1900, smack dab in a period that historians call "The Great Binge", in which most of todays narcotics were legal and easily obtainable. The trippiness of The Wizard of Oz is made more legendary by the pop culture habit of using Dark Side of the Moon as an alternate soundtrack and getting stoned.
 * 2001: A Space Odyssey, the movie. It has been claimed that drug-users would sneak into theaters just to watch the climax while stoned. The producers capitalized on it when they re-released it in the 1970s with the tagline, still the ultimate trip!
 * Likewise The Shining. The cast of the movie, before filming, would indeed all get stoned—but not using drugs. Stanley Kubrick just screened Eraserhead. Speaking of...
 * The works of David Lynch, including Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, Dune, Blue Velvet, and The Angriest Dog in the World. Lynch is a clean-living dude who likes to meditate. Notably averted by the appropriately titled The Straight Story.
 * Any musical filled with Disney Acid Sequences made under the influence of Technicolor, which got everyone excited when it was new. In those years, film productions were encouraging each other and competing for the most spectacular use of colors they pack onto celluloid.
 * Busby Berkeley Numbers. The vast majority of his production numbers are in black and white, but feature a great deal of geometric shapes and patterns.
 * This is something of a trademark of Baz Luhrmann, who directed Moulin Rouge.
 * The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. It's bizarre even for Dr. Seuss. "Bart, hand me some of that pickle juice." "Jeepers, are you sure? That's some powerful stuff!" "I won't let some Siamese twins on rollerskates make a monkey of me!"
 * Being John Malkovich.
 * Synecdoche New York. It starts off mildly conventional, but after we've encountered the family living in a house that's perpetually on fire for 30 years, the bizarre fake city in a warehouse, the play with 3 million actors, and the diary that updates daily even though the girl writing in it is apparently on the other side of the planet... man, Charlie Kaufman's one weird guy.
 * Donnie Darko was loopy but enjoyably confusing...
 * The fudged-up, trippy mess that was Across the Universe. Either the filmmakers were emulating the Beatles in every aspect of their lives, including the '60s level drug use, or they were doing an approximation.
 * Mirror Mask. Picture a world inhabited almost entirely by creatures out of the darkest corners of the Uncanny Valley. Then up the weird factor by about fifty.
 * The movie is like stepping into a Dave McKean painting, as that's who was in charge of the visuals. Most of the "Helena's" drawings were actually done by McKean. Also remember that McKean was responsible for most of the Sandman covers. Yeah. It's kinda like that.
 * Actually, Neil Gaiman just thinks like that. And the world mythology he studies obsessively really is that weird. Check out Coraline while you're at it, and his classic Sandman graphic novels.
 * Also, it makes perfect sense if you just imagine that this is where the Shinigami from Death Note come from. That's why everybody has to wear a mask 24/7.
 * What's really trippy is the song "Wake the White Queen" that is based on Mirrormask.
 * Casino Royale 1967 could best be described as "James Bond on massive amounts of acid" but had a fairly respectable creative team behind it. Aside from being a spoof, much of the effect comes from creative issues leading to there being five different directors whose scenes did not mesh very well.
 * C'mon, it cast Woody Allen as James Bond's nephew --
 * The ending includes.
 * The Kin and Dark Floors, both created and worked on by Finnish monster rockers Lordi, only make sense when the viewers are under the influence of rather powerful hallucinogens. The creators, however, were sober throughout production.
 * There's this guy from Toronto named David Cronenberg...
 * Monkeybone. A cartoonist nearly dies, leaving his body open to use to another soul—a chance pounced upon by his eponymous creation. While Monkeybone wreaks surreal havoc in this world, his creator has to barter with Dream (Giancarlo Esposito) and Death (Whoopi Goldberg) in the hereafter. It's all way Better Than It Sounds, really.
 * Supposedly the cut footage would have made it more coherent.
 * Leningrad Cowboys Go America.
 * Zardoz was made on drugs. If you listen to John Boorman's highly entertaining DVD commentary track, he openly admits it.
 * So the reviewer at Ruthless Reviews was closer to right than he probably realized?

""It is not a Cine-eye we need but a Cine-fist... we must cut with our cine-fist through to skulls, cut through to final victory and now, under the threat of an influx of 'real life' and philistinism into the Revolution we must cut through as never before! MAKE WAY FOR THE CINE-FIST!""
 * Barbarella: the story, the characters, their clothes, their names, the sets... First time you watch the movie you'll be staring at the screen in disbelief. It could only have been made in the Drugs Decade. There is not a single scene, dialog or set that could count as an exception.
 * I'd say read the original Jean-Claude Forest comic book: It gets even odder from there...
 * The 1988 Dan Aykroyd/Kim Basinger movie My Stepmother Is An Alien. Apart from being Alyson Hannigan's film debut, the entire movie plays like a hallucinogen-fueled rewrite of My Girl, except that My Girl came out three years later.
 * Which only adds to the argument, really.
 * The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) is a perfect example. See hereand here. The director says he wanted to see if movies could show time going in a non-linear direction or even sideways. The first two-thirds of the movie seem normal until the point where you can tell when the director made this "decision". (While the filmmakers themselves were not on drugs, lead actor David Bowie was struggling with cocaine addiction at the time of the shoot.)
 * Due to almost-random cutting of scenes, American audiences never got to see an even vaguely-coherent version of the film for several years. The Criterion Collection presents it uncut.
 * Napoleon Dynamite. Set in the '90s but comes across like it's the '80s; teenage slacker Napoleon tries to help his monosyllabic friend Pedro become class president while his uncle Rico peddles Tupperware and his older brother Kip harbors aspirations of becoming a cage fighter. There's more but... you have to see it for yourself. Most of the cast and crew being Mormons sort of kills the "made-on-drugs" vibe.
 * The Cell. Though, to be fair, the characters kind of were on drugs.
 * No they weren't; they were put into a machine thingy where someone could enter another person's mind while they dreamed. Any "trippiness" in the murderer's dreams is attributable to him being naturally psychologically fucked.
 * Catherine does actually smoke a joint before dreaming back to her last patient's mindscape.
 * The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is like something made by Dr. Seuss' Evil Twin. In fact, anything titled The [noun] of Dr. [name] is liable to end up here.
 * The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. It's directed by Terry Gilliam, stars Tom Waits as Satan, and has Heath Ledger morphing into Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell.
 * Terry Gilliam in general. He does not do drugs, yet is responsible for much of Monty Python's humor, as well as directing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which does a very good job of depicting the effects of the many substances partaken by the protagonists.
 * In fact it's been said by a friend of Gilliam's that it's a good thing he doesn't do drugs, as the results of that would be far too dangerous to contemplate.
 * Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter. If one watches it sober, the ridiculousness of the plot, the cheesiness of the special effects, the stupid dialogue, and the bizarre combination of '70s vibe and unquestionably late '90s setting conspire to convince you that you really should have watched it stoned.
 * Damon Packard's Reflections of Evil. Mere words cannot do it justice; perhaps a glimpse of its trailer will suffice. Yes, the ENTIRE MOVIE is like that.
 * Forbidden Zone. Kind of inevitable if you're going to make a low budget live action movie musical inspired by Deranged Animation of the 1930's, but that description really only scratches the surface. Director and script co-writer Richard Elfman claims to have never used drugs though.
 * To hear tell, anything done by The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo qualifies. Before Danny Elfman repurposed them into a groundbreaking if sometimes squicky new wave rock band, the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo were a very way-out theater-arts troupe. Forbidden Zone, in fact was directly based on their stage show at the time—meaning that yes, cabaret audiences got to ask the same question on a nightly basis...
 * We Are the Strange: A doll boy who lives alone in a forest wants to go get ice cream, but he sees no point unless he has someone to enjoy it with. He befriends a girl who just broke up with an abusive boyfriend and the two of them set off for the ice cream parlor... which happens to a spooky town haunted by monsters... and then the doll-boy dances with Mega Man and Pac-Man... and then he plays Wario Ware while inside a Humongous Mecha...
 * El Sexo y Lucia is a movie that starts at the beginning, then flashes forward, to the middle and all over the place. Part of the story involves one of the main characters telling bedtime stories . In the stories that he tells, the main character can jump into holes in the ground and pop out at any other point in the story, which was kind of what the movie was doing. In addition to the odd sequence of the movie, . All of this is played straight.
 * Avatar. The main character transfers his consciousness to a 10-foot-tall blue alien-human hybrid that looks like a big blue cat. The aliens all have what can best be described as USB braids that can have them commune with animals and their god which takes the form of a glowing tree. Said god has seeds that look like Jellyfish. Almost all the plants on the planet glow in the dark.
 * The blue is justified in their environment. Try seeing the original depictions and concept art before the media actually bothered to lift an eyebrow about it. Much more alien Na'vi but then Cameron opted for a furry-esque Neytiri and Na'vi that even non-furries went furry for.
 * All of Dziga Vertov's films. All of them. Here's just 13 seconds from The Man with the Movie Camera. Even his manifesto reads like the Timecube of film theory:

"When it comes to the trippy cinema of excess of the '60s, '70s, and '80s, the eternal question "What were they thinking?" can be replaced with "What were they smoking/snorting/ingesting/freebasing?" In the case of The Apple I'm sure an itemized list could be assembled at the end of filming: pounds of cocaine, tubs of LSD, a truckload full of PCP, disco biscuits aplenty, and enough amphetamines to kill an entire stable of horses."
 * The Men Who Stare at Goats. Go forth, young Jedi.
 * Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and its infamous psychedelic boat trip.
 * Six-String Samurai. Buddy Holly treks across a post-apocalyptic wasteland and battles cavemen, bowlers, the Russian Army, "the Windmill People" and Slash from Guns N Roses on his way to the Emerald City.
 * Fantasy Mission Force. To make a long story short, Abraham Lincoln and three other Allied major generals are kidnapped during World War II and are to be taken to Tokyo for propaganda. A crack team (emphasis on crack) is assembled to recapture them. This Ragtag Bunch of Misfits encounters a village of Amazon women who throw colored toilet paper, a haunted house and finally a fortified Nazi barn, where they find out the entire mission was a big Xanatos Gambit and make a final stand against an army of samurai, aliens and Roman gladiators. Quite possibly the most insane film ever made.
 * Michael Jackson`s Moonwalker. The entire movie makes no sense. Part of it are a lot of different music videos with Disney Acid Sequences and the main story it`s about how Michael Jackson fights with some drug dealers who want him dead because he listened to their secret plan of making children become drug addicts. His powers in the movie include becoming a Transformer-like robot by wishing upon a star.
 * Santa and The Ice Cream Bunny. Watching or even reading about this movie gives a sensation similar to being on Nyquil or some other strong cold medication.
 * There's a Danish film called "Jolly roger", which is about two Archangels accidentally losing the octopus of destiny (Or, as it is more commonly refered to "The timesquid") and sending the Janitor of heaven (Who's an eastern European immigrant)down to hell to retrieve the greatest pirate ever to sail the seven seas. So that he can, accompanied by his modern-day granddaughter, conquer the squid back from a bunch of modern-day pirates who think that a good way to handle the timesquid, the object without which the entire fabric of creation would simply unravel, is to drop it from the tallest mast until it does as it's told. This must all quickly as God is suffering from depression without his beloved Squid and is considering remaking creation because, as he puts it, "it's much simpler that way". It culminates in an "epic" showdown, during which the timesquid almost dies and is revived by pouring rum into it's aquarium 'till it gets drunk and teleports the bad guys to the reception desk of hell.
 * Anything by Tom Rubnitz. We mean anything.
 * Hey, that's cheating - "Ookie Cookie" was made long after Rubnitz died. (Obviously, it's a very elaborate fan-made attempt to mimic his style.)
 * Tommy, the 1975 film based on the 1969 Who "rock opera" album of the same name. Most of the film is very bizarre, and doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless you're either very familiar with the album or very stoned. Some standout scenes include a Marilyn Monroe-worshipping church congregation wearing Marilyn Monroe masks (with Eric Clapton as the preacher nonetheless), Tommy spinning in an iron maiden covered with needles that inject red liquid into him, Tommy following a hallucinated clone of himself around a junkyard, among others. Sprinkle a trippy synth-laden soundtrack on top and you've got quite a film.
 * The Lair of the White Worm is a barely coherent cult horror flick based on a novel by Bram Stoker. It is believed that Stoker was suffering from syphilis while writing the original novel. It was then made into a movie by Ken Russell, the same guy who did Altered States and Tommy. It was bound to end up looking like a drug trip.
 * The Apple is a hideously decadent, So Bad It's Good disco musical that even includes a dreadful musical number called "Speed", about America's drug addiction or something. Described by Nathan Rabin at [[The Onion AV Club] here.


 * The Three Stooges short Cuckoo On a Choo-Choo has Moe playing a railroad detective who finds a stolen boxcar, Larry spending the whole short channeling Marlon Brando, and Shemp playing a drunk who's in love with a 6-foot canary he sees in his hallucinations. And practically the whole short is set in that boxcar, giving it a somewhat claustrophobic feel. Add all those elements, and you have arguably the strangest Three Stooges short ever.
 * It was said to be Larry Fine's favorite Stooges short, an assessment not shared by the poor visitors for whom he would frequently screen a copy of the film.
 * Certainly averted in any film made by Alejandro Jodorowsky. He's stated that his goal was usually to produce a film which impacts its audience like a psychedelic or hallucinogenic drug, and he often took an Art Imitates Life approach to this goal. Stories abound of him taking LSD during film productions, and it's known that he used Enforced Method Acting in at least one case: The peyote/mescal trip in The Holy Mountain was filmed by dosing the cast with psilocybin mushrooms.
 * Shunya Itou's Joshuu Sasori series probably qualifies. The stageplay-like flashbacks, the Noh-style interludes, the bus that transforms into a courtroom in a tunnel, the zooming over characters shoulders as they argue...whether he was on anything when he came up with them is unknown, but given the Japanese attitude to drugs, it seems unlikely.
 * Hare + Guu aka "Jungle wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Goo." It's not even possible to explain the plot.
 * Bokustatsu Tenchi Dokuro-Chan. Imagine a world where angels kill you over & over again & get explosive diarrhea if you tale their halos off.
 * Liquid Sky is best watched when profoundly stoned, as this is the only way the viewer is likely to be able to approximate the state of its creators' minds during it making.
 * Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, both by the French filmmakers Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, are charmingly bizarre movies.
 * Several of the more random instances of Attack of the Killer Whatever, such as Death Bed: The Bed That Eats and The Refrigerator.
 * Cool World hands down.
 * Flubber, They have a robot that showed old tv shows and movies as Nightmare Fuel.
 * The movie was a remake of The Absent Minded Professor making it count more.
 * Inspector Gadget.
 * Hocus Pocus, a Disney film for children in which the male teen protagonist's virginity is major plot point and is persistently emphasized, in particular by his eight-year-old sister.
 * Geof Darrow, one of the lead concept artists on The Matrix. He designed the Sentinels and the giant battery-tower-things. He was also the artist for a graphic novel called Hard Boiled, which was also known for an almost obsessive attention to weird details in the art (and was written by Frank Miller, besides). As producer Joel Silver said, "You know how in the movie Morpheus tells Neo he has to free his mind? Geof's mind is free." Darrow noted that he'd been asked more than once what kind of drugs he took, and as he was now in his forties, said "Centrum Silver and Metamucil".
 * While we're on the subject: The Wachowskis. The Matrix movies were enjoyably trippy. Then the siblings skipped on their meds and we started wondering what scary-ass version of Speed Racer they watched on Saturday mornings...
 * Kevin Smith had only done pot a handful of times while making the View Askewniverse films, which featured a fair amount of pot-related content. Since the relatively apathetic reception to Zack and Miri Make a Porno in 2008, he's taken up pot smoking, however.