Connect with us

Editorials

The Top 5 Cerebral Horror Movies to Watch When You’re Stoned

Looking for the best horror movies to watch while high? Check out our top 5 cerebral picks! These films blend trippy visuals, eerie concepts, and mind-bending plots perfect for a stoned movie night. Just a heads-up: if weed makes you paranoid, proceed with caution!

Published

on

If you smoke weed, you know that some movies are much more fun to watch while you’re high. Films full of big ideas, excellent music, and artistic visual displays are the ones I turn to after I smoke a bowl. As a huge horror fan, I’m always hunting for the best horror movies to watch when I blaze up.

Here are my favorite horror films to watch when baked out of my mind.

A few disclaimers:

Remember, kids, don’t smoke weed unless you’re over 21 and live in a place where pot is legal! If you are someone who gets paranoid when you smoke weed, I’d recommend you avoid watching these films while high. I love the feeling of watching cerebral horror while I’m stoned, but it isn’t for everyone. Proceed with caution!

The 5 Best Cerebral Horror Movies to Watch While Stoned


Cube (1997)

As one of the films that first piqued my interest in the horror genre, Cube is a classic that will always have my heart. It follows a group of people who wake up in a strangely lit-up, cube-shaped room. On each side of the room is a door leading to another identical room with different colored lighting. The strangers don’t know how they got there, but they soon discover that many of the rooms contain killer traps like motion-detecting knives.

This film is super fun to watch when you’re high because of the deep concepts the characters discuss throughout the movie, particularly their theories of why the Cube exists and how they can escape. There’s also this sick whispery music that plays during a montage in the middle of the film, and it’s incredible. If you like smoking weed and discussing the universe with your pals, you’ll definitely love Cube.

Advertisement


Vivarium (2020)

I don’t know about you, but when I drive through a condo complex in the suburbs, I get this eerie sensation that everything is exactly the same.

In Vivarium, this concept reaches a whole new level. A young couple visits a suburban neighborhood searching for a new home and finds that they can’t escape. They drive around the entire neighborhood to keep ending up at the same house. Once they accept their failure, the two find a box outside of the house with a baby inside and a note that reads, “raise the child and be released.”

I don’t want to spoil too much for you, but the kid is a total weirdo. The tense relationship between the Nameless Child and the trapped couple is deeply compelling. But the best part about this film is its completely wacky plot that brings up questions about conformity and exploitation. Vivarium is a perfect choice for a night in with friends when you want to get baked and be completely weirded out.


Cam (2018)

I love watching this movie stoned because its concept is all the more interesting when I’m having those weed-induced thoughts about the universe.

Cam tells the story of Alice (Madeline Brewer), a cam girl with the fake name Lola on a site called FTM. Her goal is to make it into the top 50 girls list, and she’s willing to do anything to get there. But her plans are stopped in their tracks when she wakes up one morning to find that someone who looks exactly like her stole her FTM account.

This film touches on so many fears. The virtual world taking control of your life and literally stealing your identity is a huge one. There’s also just something creepy yet intriguing about the doppelgänger concept. Evil forces embodying a clone of your body is a cerebral nightmare.


Midsommar (2019)

Yeah, okay, watching Midsommar when you’re smoking weed may not be for everyone. This film bends so many conventions and is one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen. And it’s trippy as hell.

A group of friends travel to northern Sweden to witness one community’s week-long Midsommar festival. At the last minute, one of the friends brings his girlfriend, Dani, who recently lost her whole family in a tragic double-murder suicide. When they arrive for the festival, they go through a series of increasingly disturbing rituals.

Advertisement

So why is this terrifying film on my list for best horror to watch while baked? Because of the visual effects of the dancing and the synchronicity between all the community members. Dani trips on shrooms a few times in the film and being high makes those parts all the more enjoyable. When I re-watched this film before writing this article, the details of the community’s culture really stood out to me. Ari Aster is a brilliant filmmaker, and I can’t wait to see what comes next.


Suspiria (1977)

My editor told me I had to include at least one film that is more palatable for people who may get a bit too overwhelmed watching the other movies on this list, so I went with the original Suspiria. When Suzy (Jessica Harper) arrives at the premiere dance academy in Europe, she begins to uncover the mysteries that led to the murder of her classmate. This film is a visual masterpiece. The lighting sets the mood in every scene, and the film’s score is the perfect balance between dramatic, eerie, and beautiful.

If you’re looking for your first horror film to watch while high out of your mind, I highly recommend Suspiria.

Whether or not you choose to watch one of these movies on this special cannabis holiday, I wish you a safe and happy 4/20!

Hey! I’m Maya, a snarky, queer freelance writer, horror enthusiast, and history nerd. My hope is that my writing both entertains my readers and provides educational commentary on human behavior & society. In my spare time, I love to eat food, hang out with my girlfriend, and needle felt little monster sculptures.

Continue Reading
Advertisement

Editorials

What’s in a Look? The Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy

The Jason Voorhees redesign sparked heated debate, but is the backlash overblown? Dive into Friday the 13th’s formula and fan expectations.

Published

on

If you’re a longtime reader of Horror Press, you may have noticed that I really really like the Friday the 13th franchise. Can’t get enough. And yet, I simply couldn’t muster a shred of enthusiasm for piling hate on the new Jason Voorhees redesign that Horror, Inc. recently shared with an unwitting public.

Why the Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy Feels Overblown

Hockey mask? Check. Machete? Check. Clothing? Yeah, he’s wearing it. I really didn’t see the problem, but very many people online pointed out all the places where I should. The intensity and specificity of the critiques shot me right back to 2008, reminding me distinctly of watching Project Runway with my friend’s mom while I waited for him to get home from baseball practice. What, just me?

But the horror community’s sudden transformation into fashion mavens got me thinking about other things, too: the character of the franchise as a whole, how Jason Voorhees fits into it, and why I feel like this reaction has been blown out of proportion. (A disproportionate reaction to a pop culture thing? On my Internet? Well I never.)

Baghead Jason

What Does A Jason Look Like, Anyway?

What confused me the most about this reaction was something I couldn’t quite get a bead on. What does Jason Voorhees look like? His look, both masked and unmasked (especially unmasked), changes wildly from film to film, even when he’s played by the same person (in three consecutive movies, Kane Hodder played a hulking zombie Jason, a shiny slime monster Jason, and a Jason who was mainly seen in mirrors and looked like his face was stung by a thousand bees). And then there’s the matter of him being both a zombie child and a bagheaded killer before receiving his iconic hockey mask.

However, if you synthesize the various forms of the character into the archetypical Jason Voorhees, the one that most people might visualize in their head when told to imagine him, the result doesn’t not look like this new redesign. Frankly, I even think “redesign” is too strong a word for what this is. This image shows a dude in outdoorsy clothes wearing a hockey mask. It looks enough like “Jason Voorhees” to me that my eyes just slide right off of it.

Advertisement

What Do We Expect From Friday the 13th, And What Do We Need?

Ultimately, many people clearly disagree with my assessment of this redesign, which led me to ponder the franchise as a whole. If there’s something to complain about with this new look, that implies that there is a “right” way and a “wrong” way to be a Friday the 13th movie.

This I can agree with. While the franchise is wide-ranging and expansive to the point that it has included Jason going to space, fighting a dream demon, and taking a cruise ship from a New Jersey lake to the New York harbor, the movies do still follow a reasonably consistent formula.

Step 1: Generate a group of people in a place either on the shores of Crystal Lake or in Crystal Lake township (they can travel elsewhere, but this is where they must start).
Step 2: Plunk Jason down near them, give him a variety of edged weapons, and watch what happens. One girl survives the onslaught, and sometimes she brings along a friend or two as adjunct survivors. Bada bing, bada boom, you have yourself a Friday the 13th movie.

If you fuck with that formula, you’ve got a problem. But beyond that, there’s really not a hell of a lot that the movies have in common. Sometimes you have a telekinetic final girl, other times you have a child psychologist. Sometimes the dead meat characters are camp counselors, but other times they’re partiers or townies or students attending space college.

Hell, even the people killing them aren’t always the same. Look at Pamela Voorhees in the original movie or Roy in A New Beginning.

Advertisement

So why this protectiveness around the minutiae of Jason’s look?

It’s Us, Hi, We’re The Problem, It’s Us

I don’t mean to discount everyone’s negative opinions about this Jason redesign. There are a multitude of aesthetic and personal reasons to dislike what’s going on here, and you don’t have to turn that yuck into a yum just because I said so. But I think we’ve had online fandoms around long enough to see how poisonous they can be to the creative process.

For instance, was The Rise of Skywalker a better movie because it went down the laundry list of fan complaints about The Last Jedi and basically had characters stare into the camera and announce the ways they were being fixed?

Look, I’m not immune to having preconceived disdain for certain projects. If I’m waiting for a new installment in a franchise and all that I’m hearing coming out of producers’ mouths is “prequel” and “television show,” those are fighting words.

However, the constant online pushback to projects that are in early development might be one reason it has taken us so long to actually get more Friday the 13th (I’m talking in addition to the long delays amid the lawsuit, of course). It’s been more than a decade and a half without a new Jason vehicle, and that time keeps on stretching longer and longer.

Advertisement

Poll taken from Horror Press Instagram account

What Fans Really Want From a New Jason Voorhees Movie

Instead of just letting the creative tap flow and having a filmmaker put out the thing they want to make, then having somebody else take the wheel and do that same thing for the next installment, it seems like producers are terrified of making the wrong move and angering the fans, which has prevented them from actually pulling the trigger on much of anything.

Look, we survived A New Beginning. And Jason Takes Manhattan. Even Jason Goes to Hell. A controversial misstep can’t kill the immortal beast that is Friday the 13th. I say let’s just let them make one. Having something tangible to complain about is better than having nothing at all.

Continue Reading

Editorials

Monstrous Mothers: Unveiling the Horror in ‘Mommie Dearest’ and ‘Umma’

The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?

Published

on

I challenged myself to fill a gap in my cinema history this month and watched Mommie Dearest. I was very familiar with the movie due to how many drag queens reference it and because of Joan Crawford’s villainous reputation. However, I had never seen it in its entirety before, which is weird because I write about my own maternal baggage often. Without ever seeing the film, I knew this movie, categorized as a drama, belonged under my favorite genre label. Some sources even try to meet in the middle and classify it as a psychological drama, which is a phrase that does a lot of heavy lifting to remove itself from what it actually is. After all, what else should we call a film about being abused by the person who should love us most other than horror?

Does Mommie Dearest Belong in the Horror Genre?

The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?

Mommie Dearest recounts a version of Christina Crawford’s upbringing by Hollywood royalty Joan Crawford. It depicts her as an unstable, jealous, manipulative woman who only holds space for her beliefs. As with most abusive parents, she takes out her frustrations and feelings of inadequacy on those around her. Specifically, those who cannot fight back due to the power dynamics at play. This version of Joan is a vicious bully, which feels familiar for many people who grew up with an abusive parent. How many of us never knew what would set our parental monster off, so just learned to walk on eggshells? How many of us grew up believing we were the problem for way longer than we should have? How many of us normalized the abuse for so long that it carried over into adulthood, letting us believe being mistreated is just part of living?

Watch the trailer for Mommie Dearest

Advertisement

The Lasting Impact of Abusive Parents in Horror Movies

While my mother wasn’t the active bully in our home, part of my struggle with her is her complicitness in the hell she helped create for all of us. Which is why, while I don’t think Mommie Dearest is a great film, I believe it’s a decent horror flick. It made me want to revisit a better movie, Umma, that also dealt with motherhood, mental illness, and trauma. Iris K. Shim’s 2022 PG-13 horror sees Sandra Oh playing a single mother who has not healed. After growing up with her own mother, who was especially cruel to her, she has built her world around that trauma and forced her daughter to live within its walls with her. As someone who was severely homeschooled by a woman who still really needs to find a therapist, Umma hits me in my feelings every time. 

Watch the trailer for Umma below

Maternal Monsters: A Common Thread in Psycho, Hereditary, and More

Before the film starts, Oh’s character, Amanda, has turned her back on her family and cultural heritage. She has built a life that she’s not really living as she hides in her home, afraid of electricity due to the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mom. So, when her uncle shows up with her mother’s ashes, she is triggered and haunted. All of the issues she hasn’t dealt with rush to the surface, manifesting in ways that begin turning her into her deceased mom. Amanda does eventually force herself to confront her past to avoid becoming her mother and hurting her daughter. So, while Umma is different from Mommie Dearest, it’s not hard to see they share some of the same DNA. Scary moms make the genre go round which is why movies like M.O.M. Mothers of Monsters, Serial Mom, Mother, May I?, and so many others will always pull an audience by naming the monster in the title.

I doubt I am the first person on Norma Bates’ internet to clock that some of horror’s most notorious villains are parents, specifically moms. I’m also sure I cannot be the first person to argue Mommie Dearest is a horror movie on many levels. After all, a large part of the rabid fanbase seems to be comprised of genre kids who grew up wondering why the film felt familiar. However, I hope I am the first to encourage you to watch these two movies if your momma trauma will allow you to hold space for a couple more monstrous mothers this month. Both have much to say about how we cope with the fallout of being harmed by the people who should keep us safe.

Advertisement

 

Continue Reading

Horror Press Mailing List

Fangoria
Advertisement
Advertisement