The Holy Mountain · reception & legacy

How The Holy Mountain has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

It premiered at Cannes in 1973 riding the midnight-movie wave El Topo started, then vanished for decades — a bitter rights feud between Jodorowsky and producer Allen Klein kept it out of legal circulation until a 2007 restoration finally let a new generation canonise it.

What's debated

The eternal Jodorowsky fight: is this genuine visionary spiritual cinema or the most gorgeous pretentious nonsense ever filmed — and does the distinction even matter?

Its footprint

Its imagery is a bottomless well for music culture — album covers, stage shows, and videos raid it constantly, most famously when Kanye West cited it as the inspiration for his Yeezus tour design (Jodorowsky was flattered, then unimpressed he never called).

Where it stands

A cornerstone of the midnight-movie cult canon and a Letterboxd rite of passage — the 'you haven't SEEN weird until you've seen this' film.