BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW (Panos Cosmatos, 2010)

Though the storytelling isn’t nearly as tight as in Mandy, his film from 2018, Panos Cosmatos’ intense one-two punch of combining darkly surreal storytelling with an intense and highly stylized visual style was already firmly in place in his first feature Beyond the Black Rainbow. Both films are filled with expressionistic uses of colors and filters, and the takes linger longer than most; however, the most disturbing and unsettling sequence in either film is in Rainbow, a flashback to when the main character undergoes a sinister and life-changing psychedelic experience. The whole sequence is shot is shallow focus, high contrast b&w, and when I first watched it I thought it resembled a cross between the hugely overrated opening sequence to that shite film Under the Skin made sinister by treating it like E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten (one of my favorite holiday films, linked in the comments). Lo, and behold, I just read this passage on Wikipedia:

The 1966 flashback segment of the movie was inspired by E. Elias Merhige’s experimental horror film Begotten (1990). Begotten was entirely shot in high-contrast black-and-white, which for Cosmatos “was a perfect look for the flashback because I wanted it to feel like a fading and decayed artifact.”