A Short Anti-LSD Horror Film Made by the Lockheed Corporation (1969)

Dur­ing the late 1960s, the defense con­trac­tor Lock­heed Cor­po­ra­tion took a strange detour into film­mak­ing and spon­sored a series of short films, each exam­in­ing the per­ils of a par­tic­u­lar hard­core drug. Above, you can watch “Case Study: LSD,” a three-minute short doc­u­ment­ing a young wom­an’s acid trip. Every­thing seems pret­ty groovy, until the 18-year-old pro­tag­o­nist goes to eat a hot dog. That’s when things go hor­ri­bly wrong: the hot dog springs to life, claims it has a wife and sev­en kids to sup­port, and screams bloody mur­der as it gets mer­ci­less­ly ingest­ed. A hor­ror film, if I’ve ever seen one.

You can watch the three oth­er short films in the series here: Case Study: Hero­in, Case Study: Amphet­a­mines, and Case Study: Bar­bi­tu­rates.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­toric LSD Debate at MIT: Tim­o­thy Leary v. Pro­fes­sor Jerome Lettvin (1967)

Watch The Bicy­cle Trip: An Ani­ma­tion of The World’s First LSD Trip in 1943

Curi­ous Alice — The 1971 Anti-Drug Movie Based on Alice in Won­der­land That Made Drugs Look Like Fun

Artist Draws Nine Por­traits on LSD Dur­ing 1950s Research Exper­i­ment

Ken Kesey’s First LSD Trip Ani­mat­ed


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Comments (6)
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  • Omar Gonzalez says:

    I’ve seen this lit­tle film before. I think it“s a lit­tle mas­ter­piece. Fun­ny and a bit nos­tal­gic.

  • Omar Gonzalez says:

    I hope to God that bitch was pros­e­cut­ed for mur­der­ing that hot dog.

  • Toad says:

    Sounds to me like they tried to use the actu­al tales of users, in an attempt to be more real­is­tic than the anti-drug films that were in vogue in junior high school audi­to­ri­ums back then.

    Good fun, I like it. If she were a lit­tle more ani­mat­ed, it would sound like it came from one of those evenings where peo­ple fall into exchang­ing acid war sto­ries. If she told it bet­ter, the part about jump­ing on a hot dog in the street could real­ly be fun­ny, like, “Yeah, I’ve done stuff like that.”

    I don’t know how much acid kids are tak­ing these days, but you do get a bad trip some­times; that’s part of the deal. The cou­ple that I had were far worse than a scream­ing hot dog–two bad trips out of over a hun­dred good ones (we used to count until we lost count..we were young…).

    One of my friends had a friend–but I always believed this story–who had a night­mare trip that involved Mick­ey Mouse smil­ing and wav­ing at him every­where he looked. He could­n’t get away from smil­ing Mick­ey Mouse, and it became a prob­lem for sev­er­al hours. One that I WAS there for, a girl freaked out over spi­ders that weren’t there, took her what seemed like an hour to get over it, and then I’ll be damned if a spi­der did­n’t crawl up on her. She went bounc­ing off the walls, and the rest of us hurt our­selves laugh­ing. Bad trips are kind of great once they’re over–you learn a ton from the REALLY bad ones, and you tell sto­ries like the one in this vid about the not quite so bad ones.

    Hap­py trails.

  • Gerard says:

    “Dur­ing the late 1960s, the defense con­trac­tor Lock­heed Cor­po­ra­tion took a strange detour into film­mak­ing and spon­sored a series of short films, each exam­in­ing the per­ils of a par­tic­u­lar hard­core drug. ”

    Not exact­ly a strange detour, as Lock­heed were linked to the CIA, and in par­tic­u­lar one man, Sid­ney Got­tlieb. Got­tlieb is MKULTRA / LSD but he’s also lia­son to Lock­heed when build­ing the U2 spy plane. It’s not a huge jump to make. The CIA in addi­tion to work­ing with sub­con­trac­tors like Lock­heed also worked with oth­er branch­es of the gov­ern­ment, name­ly the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the Depart­ment of Defense and the Office of Naval Intel­li­gence, though it is unclear what role if any Got­tlieb played in these affairs oth­er than autho­riz­ing them. But LSD, San­doz Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, CIA, MKULTRA, LSD, Lock­heed and Got­tlieb? Not huge jumps.

  • Marshalldoc says:

    It was an ani­mal rights hal­lu­ci­na­tion… “Don’t eat me! I’ve got a wife and 7 lit­tle cock­tail wieners at home!!”

  • d woo says:

    That’s not a night­mare, that’s called mind­full­ness. Hot­dogs are dis­gust­ing and you should nev­er put them in your body. LSD saves anoth­er soul.

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