The Trippiest Things on Television

The Trippiest Things on

Television (and the internet)

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You can hardly turn on the television these days without seeing some rich, arrogant twat telling you how to live your life, and if they’re not telling it to you, then they’re telling it to someone else. Good dramas are a rarity, movies are all starting to get repetitive, and sit-coms are just getting old. Most music videos are pretty unoriginal too. Most of them are of a talentless band playing on stage with a chop-happy editor cutting every two seconds in an emulation of a video that came out seconds before, and that looks exactly the same. It’s extremely Fordist – most television is.

I got bored of all of that rubbish a while back, and thanks to a combination of insomnia and morbid curiosity, I found a lot of television that was worth watching. And some internet videos too. Atmosphere, surrealism, darkness and talent: I found it all lurking on late-night TV. This is my guide to some of the best, most trippy shows. I recommend watching past midnight. And to be on drugs when you do.

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6. Monkey Dust

A paedophile tries to groom a little girl on the internet by pretending to be a ten-year old boy named Benji, always being caught out for such reasons as correcting his conversational partner’s grammar or mentioning an anecdote about World War 2. An elderly couple kiss goodnight, only for the repressed old man to descend into a dream world of flying penises and phallic buildings leaking liquid into the air. An intimidating company decides to promote cancer as a positive and popular experience, changing its name to Closure in the name of business. A boy is dropped off at his ecstatic father’s house where, after the child mistakenly calls his mother’s new lover ‘daddy’, the father kills himself.

A cartoon sketch show notorious for its excessively dark content such as child abuse, terminal illness, rape and murder. Although each sketch is done by a separate company, they are designed to fit and transition into one another smoothly, resulting in a dream-like continuity that compliments the strange images presented. Single sketches of no longer than a few minutes draw you in with an atmosphere that feature-length films struggle to achieve. The faceless paedophile bends over his computer as he talks to the little girl over an instant messenger, the only sounds being the keyboard keys rattling, the sucking and blowing of smoke, and the harsh wheezing of the old man’s lungs.

Three seasons await you, with no signs of softening up as the final episodes draw closer. After the third series, one of the co-creators Harry Thompson died, and a decision was made to end the cartoon there. At least it never got old.

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5. Rubber Johnny

The synopsis for Rubber Johnny is as follows. A demented and deformed teenager is locked in his basement by his foul-mouthed father, where all he has for company is a small dog and his own shape-shifting rave techniques. Throughout the film, Johnny snorts enormous lines of coke from his wheelchair, his huge head seems to explode from the music, and at the end of the experience he repeatedly bashes his face against a glass surface where it splatters and deforms in explicit and disturbing close-up. All the while, Aphex Twin’s track ‘afx237 v7’ bleeps and squiggles and rattles at breakneck speed, driving up to a harsh, screaming climax that wouldn’t sound out of place at the end of Alien.

How Cunningham came up with this, I don’t know. His rubbish explanation of ‘imagining a raver shape shifting at a gig’ really doesn’t explain the bulbous melon and demented mind of Johnny, played by Cunningham himself (and filmed in his own basement with the help of a friend). Nor does it explain the bursting head, the psychiatrist at the start having to sedate an excited Johnny, and a slurring father who opens the door to the basement every now and then to yell obsceneties at his son. If that’s all there is to it, then there was a ridiculous amount of derivation from the main idea. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it were aided by special substances.

Rubber Johnny is a creation by experimental and dark music video director Chris Cunningham, the man also behind the music videos for Aphex Twin’s ‘Windowlicker’ and ‘Come to Daddy’, Autechre’s ‘Second Bad Vibel’ and the ridiculously cool ‘All is Full of Love’ by Bjork, where two robots entangle intimately while being repaired. If you’re looking for some more of Cunningham’s dark work, then check these videos. They are messed up, but none are on Rubber Johnny’s level.

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4. The Work of David Firth

Two beetles brutally rape a little boy’s grandmother with a enormous, hairy penis. Later, she asks her grandson to ‘moisten her gash’ with a body cream. A milkman is dragged into a house during his rounds and brutally killed. The demented killed then hunts down his wife, kills her and rapes her corpse – then her child walks in. A deep-eyed, green-skinned figure digs up a mutilated corpse while mumbling about it returning from The Great War, proceeds to serve him dinner, then becomes furious at the prospect of the torso not finishing its food. Welcome to the world of David Firth.

David Firth became a well-known name on the internet after his flash series ‘Salad Fingers’ made its rounds. The title character, a green-skinned schitzophrenic figure, navigates a vast wasteland looking for rusty spoons and kettles which bring out orgasmic cries at the slightest touch. In one episode, Salad fingers finds a nettle. He proceeds to rub it over his nipple, and out leaks a droplet of milk. Christ.

Firth’s website Fat-Pie is a treasure trove of the most darkest and surreal cartoons available on the internet. Usually voiced by himself, and occasionally his friends, it just goes to show that you don’t need ten million pounds to evoke an atmosphere and disturb the masses.

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3. Jam

A mother begs a boiler repair man to fix her baby, it being recently killed by cot death. He reluctantly agrees and soon the mother and father admire their beautiful child as it hums contently, a myriad of rumbling pipes emerging from its body. A thief holds up a shopkeeper with a gun hidden in his stomach. It turns out to be facing the wrong way, and the customer in the queue behind him is shot in head. A man declares to his ex-wife on a video camera that he has a present for her, a wood chipper, and that thanks to this tape she can see herself receiving his gift. He then turns the camera to her window, cries out her name and, when she comes to the window, throws himself into it and spatters over her window. A very dark contender, another product from the mind of the great Chris Morris.

A comedy sketch show that sometimes leaves you unsure whether or not to laugh, Jam plays with your expectations. Even when the sketches aren’t too dark to laugh at, the odd editing and ambient music will probably still unsettle you. The opening monologues where Morris spends a minute rambling nonsense set the scene for the rest of the show, for that is what Jam is comprised of: nonsense.

Probably the most abstract and experimental work from Morris, the creator of classic shows The Day Today and Brass Eye, the latter of which received extreme controversy with its Paedophile special. Jam a live-action adaption of an equally surreal radio television show, Blue Jam, which featured dark and incessant monologues from Morris to ambient backdrops, as well as celebrity-fooling interviews which would become a regular feature in his later works. It was so unsettling that it ultimately clocked in at number 26 on Channel 4′s 100 Greatest Scary Moments.

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2. Schism by Tool

A skeletal humanoid with arteries and veins for hair carries its apparently weightless partner around with it like a balloon. Later, this partner pulls out a protruding vein from the neck of our main humanoid, which then melts into a pool of blood. Small creatures emerge from the crimson pool and latch onto the humanoid’s cheeks with their teeth. The veins around the figure’s head grow and entangle its face as it appears to sleep. The two figures’ faces elongate and they join to form a single, twisted being. Jeez.

There isn’t much to say here that isn’t already running through your minds. How messed up! Below is the great work of Tool Guitarist Adam Jones, who directs most of the band’s videos in his strange style that regularly includes stop motion. Really, you have to watch the video to appreciate just how strange and amazing it is.

And it doesn’t end there. There are other Tool videos just as horrific. The one for Parabola is a ten-minute short film where three suited humanoids stand around a table, slowly hover above it face-down, and vomit a thick black substance as they rotate around the table, ultimately creating a circle of vomit. Later, an almost-human figure with tendrils emerging from its face dissects a small creature he had found watching him. I wonder how Jones convinced his bandmates to let him helm the music videos with his disturbing ideas, but I’m glad he did.

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1. Aeon Flux ( The Animated Show)

A secluded jail situated in an ocean of pink paralytic fluid, its body dotted with frozen figures, their faces twisted in horror. A love-nest hidden in the stomach of a missing naked politician, complete with a crimson double bed. A monstrous baby that kills with a single horrific cry. A stick-thin lifeform that controls and softens the mind by untying and entering bellybuttons. A protagonist that is killed halfway through the series, only to be replaced with a clone for the duration of the show. I think it’s safe to say that Aeon Flux is pretty much the most trippy, insane and psychedelic thing on television.

The show takes place in a totalitarian society where a man named Trevor Goodchild has recently come to power. Employing a no-secrets policy punctuated by endless security cameras and systems, he exemplifies this by appearing on television naked in the middle of an interview. A scantily clad agent named Aeon Flux is our protagonist. She is sometimes the nemesis of Goodchild, and sometimes his lover. She flips from trying to kill him to trying to bed him between episodes, their love affair being as complex as the storylines of the episodes themselves.

The clip below is from the ‘second series’, which consists of five short episodes no longer than five minutes which all result in Aeon being killed at the end in a variety of ways. The ‘third series’ is comprised of ten half-hour episodes which have storylines which are a little more coherent (but not much). Aeon survives these episodes… usually.

I think the most disturbing thing about this show is that it was directed and created by the man who came up with the characters from Rugrats, created its opening sequence (you can really tell by the animation style if you look) and directed the pilot episode. Who knew that such a messed up mind was behind one of the shows that I watched almost every day as a child? Who knows what subliminal anomalies have messed up my head, and how long until the trigger is activated and I go off on a screaming machete rampage dressed only in a nappy.

Oh, and stay away from the pathetic live-film adaption starring Charlize Theron. It’s God-awful.

And relatively normal.

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