Strange Attractor & The Trip @ ACMI Sun 11 Jan

The Australian tour of Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna continues with a launch at ACMI in Melbourne on Sunday Jan 11, as part of ACMI’s Psychedelic Film Festival.

​Conversation with Graham St John following screening of Roger Corman’s The Trip.

​The Trip

Roger Corman | United States | 1967 | R18+

Independent film pioneer Roger Corman’s The Trip marks one of the earlier forays into psychedelic narrative filmmaking.

Written by Jack Nicholson and featuring the likes of Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Susan Strasberg and Dennis Hopper, The Trip carries audiences through the psychedelic journey of finding oneself through chemically aided introspection.

Corman reportedly took LSD himself to prepare for the making of this film, and he used his experiences to cinematically simulate the moods, sounds and visions felt on the drug. With artful shots, trippy visual sequences, groovy settings and innovative camera movements, Corman was widely known for making shoestring-budget cult films that leave lasting impressions on viewers and the box office.

As one of American International Pictures’ most successful releases, The Trip cost around $100,000 to make and grossed a whopping $6 million during its initial run. Released during the ‘Summer of Love’, The Trip was not only inspired by psychedelia but also made its own cultural reverberations and generated a new wave of drug-induced Hollywood films to follow.

A screening of The Trip followed by a conversation with Graham St John, author of Strange Attractor, moderated by Fiona Patten.

Schedule

2pm Welcome & introduction

2.12pm Screening of The Trip

3.33pm Discussion: Graham St John & Fiona Patten

3.53pm Book sales and signing

Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna

Published in Oct 2025 by MIT Press (with a foreword by Erik Davis) and described in Publishers Weekly as "a captivatingly humanizing" account that is "as weird, wild, and nontraditional as its subject," Strange Attractor is a comprehensive chronicle of the life, work, and legacy of the 20th century’s psychedelic renaissance man. More about Strange Attractor.

Praise for Strange Attractor:

"Due to St John’s intellectual reach, the book has, like a dark planet, drawn an entire menagerie of late 20th-century weirdness into its oblique orbit." — LA Review of Books

"Strange Attractor will rightfully take its place in the psychedelic canon as an accomplished work of biography." — The Monthly

"A sympathetic and infectious travelogue of McKenna's psychedelic multiverse, but also pretty unflinching and even rigorous in unpacking the very, very high weirdness."

~Jesse Jarnow, author of Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America

"This enrapturing book is psychoactive in all the best ways. You don’t know Terence McKenna until you’ve read Strange Attractor." ~R. U. Sirius, cofounder of Mondo 2000

Info and ticket

Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI)

Cinemas, Level 2ACMI, Fed Square

Melbourne