To understand Jodorowsky the filmmaker, one must first understand his roots in the explosive world of avant-garde theater. In the early 1960s, alongside artists Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor, he co-founded the “Panic Movement”. This wasn’t your typical theater troupe. Named for the wild god Pan, the movement embraced “absurdism and staging violent, shocking theatrical events” designed to shatter the complacency of the audience. This philosophy of confrontation, of art as a happening, became the very DNA of his cinematic work.  

This ethos exploded onto the screen with his first full-length feature, Fando y Lis (1968). Based on a play by his Panic co-founder Arrabal, the film is a raw, black-and-white odyssey following a young couple on a desperate search for the mythical, paradise-like city of Tar. It’s a journey through a post-apocalyptic landscape littered with bizarre characters and unsettling, often cruel, interactions. Watching it today, you can see the blueprint for the spiritual quests that would define his later, more famous films, but here it’s presented with a savage, unfiltered energy.  

The film’s premiere at the 1968 Acapulco Film Festival is the stuff of legend. It didn’t just receive bad reviews; it caused a full-blown riot. The audience, outraged by its graphic and surreal content, wanted Jodorowsky’s head. The film was subsequently banned in Mexico, where it was made. For any other young director, this would have been a career-ending disaster. For Jodorowsky, it was a resounding success. This reveals that the scandal wasn’t an unfortunate side effect; it was the entire point. He wasn’t just making a movie; he was staging a Panic happening on a national scale. The provocation was the art. This event established the central paradox of his career: his work would be defined by a stark disconnect between conventional success and artistic intent. While it holds a respectable 80% on Rotten Tomatoes from modern critics and an IMDb rating of 6.7/10 , its initial box office was practically non-existent, reportedly a mere $1,234. The riot was his true opening weekend.  

Forging the Midnight Movie: El Topo & The Holy Mountain

After the confrontational debut of Fando y Lis, Jodorowsky honed his vision and, in the process, accidentally created a new cinematic institution. His next two films, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, would not only cement his status as a cult icon but also give birth to the “midnight movie” phenomenon.

El Topo (1970) – The Acid Western

On the surface, El Topo (The Mole) is a western. A black-clad gunfighter, played by Jodorowsky himself, traverses a desert landscape on a quest for enlightenment. But any similarity to John Ford or Sergio Leone ends there. This is an “acid western,” a film that injects the genre with a potent cocktail of “grisly biblical rewrite and Federico Felliniesque freak show” aesthetics. The narrative is a two-part spiritual allegory, blending Christian imagery, Zen Buddhist philosophy, and shocking, graphic violence. It’s a film where our hero must defeat four master gunfighters before being reborn as a holy fool living in a cave with a community of disabled and outcast individuals.  

Championed by none other than John Lennon, who convinced Beatles manager Allen Klein to buy the distribution rights, El Topo found its home not in mainstream theaters but in the late-night slots of independent cinemas in the United States. It became the original midnight movie, a ritual for counter-culture audiences seeking something far beyond Hollywood’s offerings. This cultural impact is staggering when contrasted with its financial reality. While it garnered strong reviews (80% on Rotten Tomatoes, 65 on Metacritic) and even won prestigious Ariel Awards in Mexico for its cinematography and design , its box office was modest, estimated around $161,000.  

The Holy Mountain (1973) – The Psychedelic Masterpiece

Financed by Klein after the cult success of El Topo, The Holy Mountain is Jodorowsky unleashed. It is arguably the zenith of his psychedelic vision, a film that feels less directed and more channeled. Loosely inspired by the esoteric novel Mount Analogue, the film follows a Christ-like thief who is guided by a powerful Alchemist (again, played by Jodorowsky) on a quest for immortality. He joins a group of seven powerful figures, each representing a planet and a societal corruption (weapons manufacturing, cosmetics, art, etc.), to ascend the Holy Mountain and displace the gods who live there.  

Here, the Jodorowsky style is codified. The visuals are breathtakingly strange and meticulously composed, like Renaissance paintings dropped in acid. He famously used real amputees, circus performers, and non-actors to create a world that feels utterly authentic in its surreality. The film is a dense tapestry of symbolism, drawing from alchemy, the tarot, shamanism, and various world religions, all with the explicit goal of leading the viewer toward an “expanded consciousness”. Its legendary fourth-wall-breaking ending, where Jodorowsky zooms out the camera to reveal the film crew, is the ultimate thesis statement. He tells his disciples and the audience, “We are images, dreams, photographs… We must not create a soul. We are the soul! We must break the illusion.” It is a direct command to stop seeking enlightenment on the screen and to find it in “real life.”  

The film was a critical darling, scoring even higher than its predecessor with an 85% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 76 on Metacritic. Yet again, its box office was minuscule, around $85,000. This pattern establishes a different definition of success. Jodorowsky’s goal was never to make money but to create what he called a “psychedelic pill”. The low box office is not a sign of failure but a testament to the films’ radical, uncommercial nature. Their true return on investment is measured in cultural capital and artistic influence, which is immeasurable and far exceeds their financial performance.  

The Ghost of Arrakis: The Greatest Film Never Made

Sometimes, an artist’s most influential work is one that never comes to fruition. Such is the case with Jodorowsky’s legendary, ill-fated attempt to adapt Frank Herbert’s science-fiction epic, Dune. After the success of The Holy Mountain, he set his sights on a project of truly cosmic ambition, one that would have undoubtedly changed the landscape of sci-fi cinema forever.

His vision was a testament to his magnificent madness. The cast he assembled was surreal in itself: he wanted the eccentric artist Salvador Dalí to play the Padishah Emperor (for a reported fee of $100,000 per hour), Orson Welles as the corpulent Baron Harkonnen, Mick Jagger as the villainous Feyd-Rautha, and even his own son Brontis as the hero, Paul Atreides. He planned a sprawling, 14-hour epic with a soundtrack to be composed by the progressive rock titans Pink Floyd and Magma.  

Beyond the cast, he gathered what he called his “spiritual warriors”—a dream team of visual artists who would define the look of science fiction for decades to come. He recruited the Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger to design the grotesque world of the Harkonnens, the French comic book master Jean “Moebius” Giraud for character and world design, and the British artist Chris Foss for spaceship concepts. The pre-production book they created, a tome filled with thousands of storyboards and designs, is a holy grail for film lovers.  

Ultimately, the project collapsed under the weight of its own ambition and Hollywood’s unwillingness to fund such a wildly expensive and lengthy vision. Yet, its failure was a creative big bang. The concepts and, more importantly, the artists he had assembled, were scattered into the cinematic winds. Their work on  

Dune became a wellspring of inspiration. Giger, Moebius, and Foss’s influence would be felt profoundly in Ridley Scott’s Alien, and the visual language they developed has echoed through countless other science fiction films. The story of this glorious failure, now immortalized in the fantastic 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, has become a powerful myth in its own right, a testament to a vision so pure it could not be contained by the realities of the film industry.  

A Surrealist Rebirth: The Horror and Artistry of Santa Sangre

After the collapse of Dune and a commercially disastrous experience with the Peter O’Toole-led The Rainbow Thief (1990), where his artistic control was stripped away, Jodorowsky was absent from cinema for nearly a decade. When he returned with  

Santa Sangre (1989), it was a triumphant, terrifying, and surprisingly focused masterpiece that proved his artistic fires still burned brightly.

Santa Sangre (Holy Blood) is a return to the macabre circus world of his youth, but with a newfound narrative discipline. I see it as a masterful synthesis of genres: it’s a surrealist slasher film, a deeply psychological horror story that echoes Hitchcock’s Psycho, and a heartbreaking family tragedy. The film follows Fenix, a young man traumatized by witnessing his father sever his mother’s arms before killing himself. Years later, Fenix escapes a mental institution and reunites with his armless mother, becoming her “hands” to carry out a series of gruesome murders against women.

 

Unlike the sprawling, episodic quests of El Topo and The Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre is a more contained and emotionally coherent story. It is a powerful exploration of trauma, Oedipal obsession, and the fractured self. The surrealism is still potent—a funeral for an elephant, a cult of women worshipping a dismembered saint—but it’s all in service of Fenix’s tormented psyche. It’s one of his most accessible films, yet it remains profoundly disturbing and visually inventive.

The film was a critical vindication. It was lauded by critics like Roger Ebert, who called it “a movie like none other I have seen before”. It holds a stellar 89% on Rotten Tomatoes and won Best Film at both the Paris and Madrid fantastic film festivals. Its unflinching violence earned it an NC-17 rating in the United States, further cementing Jodorowsky’s reputation as a fearless artist who refused to compromise.  

Santa Sangre proved that even after years in the cinematic wilderness, his power to shock, move, and mesmerize was undiminished.

Cinema as Therapy: Healing the Past in The Dance of Reality & Endless Poetry

After Santa Sangre, Jodorowsky entered another long cinematic hiatus, this time for 23 years. During this period, he focused on his other passions: writing comics, teaching tarot, and developing his unique therapeutic practice, “psychomagic.” This practice involves prescribing symbolic, often theatrical, acts for people to perform to heal deep-seated psychological wounds. His belief became that “If the art does not heal it is not an art form”. When he finally returned to filmmaking, it was with this new philosophy at the forefront, turning the camera inward to heal his own past.  

His comeback film, The Dance of Reality (2013), is a literal act of psychomagic on celluloid. It’s an autobiography of his painful childhood in Tocopilla, Chile, but with a crucial twist. Instead of simply recounting the abuse he suffered at the hands of his stern, Stalin-obsessed father, Jodorowsky reimagines him, healing him through art. He transforms his father from a tyrant into a figure capable of pain, growth, and redemption. The casting is the ultimate expression of this therapeutic goal: his eldest son, Brontis Jodorowsky (the naked child from El Topo), plays his own grandfather, Jodorowsky’s father. The film set becomes a stage for a public exorcism of generational trauma.  

He continued this journey with Endless Poetry (2016), a sequel that chronicles his young adulthood in Santiago, where he broke from his family to join a circle of bohemian poets and artists. Again, the family is central to the production, with his other son, Adan Jodorowsky (who also composed the music), playing the young Alejandro.  

These two films mark a profound evolution in his work. The surrealism is still there—singing mothers, fantastical characters, and dreamlike visuals—but it’s imbued with a warmth and emotional sincerity that was often buried under the shock tactics of his earlier films. The primary goal is no longer to provoke the audience, but to heal the artist. The critical reception for this new direction was overwhelmingly positive, with both films earning an incredible 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics celebrated this long-overdue return, noting that the films were overflowing with not just imagination, but also a newfound heart. The artist who once sought to attack the public consciousness had evolved into one who invited us into a deeply personal process of shared vulnerability and healing.  

The Jodoverse: A Universe Beyond Film

To limit an appreciation of Alejandro Jodorowsky to his films is to see only one part of a sprawling creative cosmos. His influence extends powerfully into the world of graphic novels, where he has constructed a universe as rich and complex as any cinematic franchise.

His most famous collaboration is with the legendary French artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud on The Incal. Born from the ashes of their work on  

Dune, The Incal is not a mere side project but a parallel dimension for his ideas. It’s a sprawling space opera that follows a low-class private detective, John DiFool, who comes into possession of a mystical artifact of immense power. The series is a masterwork of science fiction, blending social satire, metaphysical exploration, and breathtaking visual invention. It is deeply rooted in the tarot and explores the same themes of spiritual awakening and societal critique that dominate his films.  

From The Incal sprang the “Jodoverse,” a shared comic book universe that includes epic sagas like The Metabarons and The Technopriests. This body of work is arguably as influential in the world of comics as his films are in cinema. It demonstrates that his creative energy cannot be contained by a single medium; his is a vision that demands expression across multiple canvases.

Conclusion: The Enduring Legacy of an Atheist Mystic

To measure Alejandro Jodorowsky’s career by conventional metrics—box office returns, mainstream awards, industry acceptance—is to miss the point entirely. His is a legacy written not in ledgers but in the altered consciousness of the audiences he challenged and the generations of artists he inspired, from David Lynch to Kanye West. He is the quintessential cult filmmaker, a shaman whose success is gauged by the intensity of his impact, not the breadth of his appeal.  

Returning to that perfect descriptor, the “atheist mystic,” feels like the most honest way to summarize his life’s work. He uses the tools of mysticism—symbolism, ritual, allegory—to dismantle the very structures of organized thought, be it religion, politics, or even family. He forces us to confront the grotesque to find the sublime, to journey through psychological hell to find a kind of spiritual grace.  

His films are, without question, an acquired taste. They are demanding, often abrasive, and will forever exist outside the mainstream. But they represent a form of cinema that is vital and fearless. To watch a Jodorowsky film is not to sit back and be entertained; it is to actively undertake a pilgrimage. It is a journey that is frequently difficult, sometimes disturbing, but always unforgettable. For those willing to take the trip, the destination is a state of expanded awareness that few other artists have ever had the courage or the madness to explore.

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Alejandro Jodorowsky: Major Filmography & Critical Reception

Film Title	Year	IMDb Rating	Rotten Tomatoes (Tomatometer)	Metacritic (Critic Score)	Worldwide Box Office (Approx. USD)	Key Awards & Nominations
Fando y Lis	1968	6.7/10	80%	N/A	$1,234	Banned at Acapulco Film Festival
El Topo	1970	7.3/10	80%	65/100	$161,697	Ariel Awards for Best Cinematography, Editing, Production Design
The Holy Mountain	1973	7.7/10	85%	76/100	$85,453	Special Mention, Taormina Film Fest
Santa Sangre	1989	7.5/10	89%	N/A	$9,255 (Finland only reported)	Best Film (Paris & Madrid Fantastic Film Festivals), Saturn Award
The Dance of Reality	2013	7.4/10	94%	76/100	$558,636	Winner, Prix Saint-Germain; Nominated, SACD Prize (Cannes)
Endless Poetry	2016	7.7/10	94%	78/100	$559,029	Official Selection at Cannes, Locarno, and numerous other festivals

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