Alejandro Jodorowsky - vo.rs

The Holy Mountain: Jodorowsky's Alchemical Provocation

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000

The Holy Mountain (1973) exists because a Beatle liked El Topo. That is the short version of one of the strangest financing stories in cinema: John Lennon and Yoko Ono, evangelised by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s midnight-movie sensation, leaned on Allen Klein’s ABKCO to bankroll whatever the Chilean provocateur wanted to make next. What he wanted to make was a million-dollar avant-garde epic about the alchemical transformation of the soul, staffed by non-actors he had reportedly put through weeks of spiritual and physical training, and ending on a gesture designed to detonate the very cult that had funded it. It is the most beautiful hostile act in the history of cult film, and half a century on it has lost none of its capacity to dazzle and offend in the same breath.

Santa Sangre: Jodorowsky's Circus of Guilt and Armless Mothers

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Most directors make their strangest film young and spend the rest of their careers apologising for it. Alejandro Jodorowsky did the opposite. Santa Sangre (1989) arrived when he was sixty, nearly two decades after the acid-Western notoriety of El Topo and the alchemical excess of The Holy Mountain, and it is the film where he finally discovered what all his imagery had been reaching for. The dream logic is intact. The provocations are intact. What is new is a story with a spine and characters you are asked to love, and the collision of those two registers produces the best film he ever made.

El Topo: Jodorowsky and the Birth of the Midnight Movie

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 12:00:00 +0000

There is a specific kind of film that only exists because someone decided ordinary screening hours were negotiable. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970) is the origin point of that idea. Before it, “midnight movie” meant a cheap horror double bill for insomniac teenagers. After it, midnight became a venue — a place where a film could gather a congregation instead of an audience, one week at a time, on word of mouth alone. More than fifty years on, the film that started the ritual remains the strangest thing to have ever done it.