A film that turned spiritual enlightenment into spectacle—and filmmaking into a criminal chronicle.
🎬 1970, the Zacatecas desert in Mexico. Director Alejandro Jodorowsky stands three meters from actor David Silva and empties a revolver loaded with blanks directly into his face—not for a rehearsal, but for the final take. The gunpowder leaves burns on the skin, the flash blinds for several seconds, but the camera keeps rolling. Silva doesn’t scream, doesn’t complain—because in the world of El Topo, the line between acting and real suffering has been erased by the director’s vision, like chalk from a blackboard. This isn’t the Stanislavski method. It’s an incident report stretched over 125 minutes of screen time.
🐰 The film, which would become a counterculture manifesto a year later, is shot like a slaughterhouse. Real rabbits die on camera—not props, not editing tricks, but living animals, whose deaths Jodorowsky would later confirm in interviews without a shred of remorse. Seven-year-old Brontis Jodorowsky, the director’s son, appears nude in scenes that today would qualify as child endangerment under any country’s laws. The crew sustains real injuries; the director calls it “spiritual experience.” The budget of $400,000 makes every dollar equivalent to a drop of blood or a scream no one will hear beyond the desert.
💰 John Lennon and Yoko Ono first see El Topo at a private screening in New York and experience something akin to a religious revelation. Lennon, the author of Imagine and a symbol of the pacifist movement, calls his manager Allen Klein at ABKCO Films and demands the rights be purchased—immediately, at any cost, without legal due diligence on the origins of the initial capital. Klein, whose name would later become synonymous with conflicts of interest in the music industry, buys the rights and launches the film through a network of midnight screenings.
🎭 Thus is born the phenomenon of the midnight movie—a cultural code of the 1970s underground, when theaters across America begin showing El Topo strictly at midnight for an audience that comes not for entertainment, but for a transformation of consciousness. The film becomes the first in a chain that would later include The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Eraserhead. Jodorowsky blends Buddhist philosophy, tarot symbolism, spaghetti western archetypes, and surrealism into a cocktail critics would dub an acid Western—a genre existing at the intersection of an LSD trip and Sergio Leone.
🔥 But the financial alchemy has a dark underside. The initial investments in the film came from sources Jodorowsky prefers not to discuss in official interviews. Lennon, unknowingly, invests former Beatles money into a project where the director kills animals on camera and traumatizes children. A pacifist funds violence. The counterculture buys the rights to exploitation. This isn’t a paradox—it’s the criminal logic of an industry where artistic value serves as an alibi for crimes against its participants.
💎 David Lynch, Bob Dylan, Roger Waters, and Kanye West would later cite El Topo as a source of inspiration. Lynch copies its aesthetic for Eraserhead; West quotes its visual language in the Runaway video. The film enters the arthouse canon—but none of these artists ask: at what cost was their muse created?
⚖️ 1974—the conflict between Jodorowsky and Allen Klein explodes like a time bomb. The director demands full control over the rights; Klein, through ABKCO, refuses to relinquish his monopoly. Jodorowsky, whose temperament is closer to shamanic trance than legal casuistry, responds with the only weapon available to him—a public curse. He declares the film “dead,” bans its screenings wherever he has any influence, and launches a campaign to erase El Topo from cultural memory.
🎞️ The film vanishes from official distribution for thirty years—from 1974 to 2004. This isn’t a metaphor for oblivion, but a literal disappearance: no VHS, no LaserDiscs, no licensed copies. El Topo becomes a legend, accessible only through third-generation pirated recordings passed hand-to-hand like samizdat in the USSR. Quality degrades with each copy, but the myth grows in proportion to its inaccessibility.
🕳️ The paradox is absolute: a film created as a manifesto against material attachment (its protagonist journeys from avenger to enlightened hermit) becomes a hostage to material interests—the conflict between creator and distributor. Jodorowsky, who preaches ego renunciation in the film, cannot relinquish control over his own work. Klein, whose ABKCO owns the rights to the Rolling Stones catalog and other assets, holds El Topo as a dead asset—not for distribution, but as a bargaining chip.
📀 2007—El Topo is officially released on DVD after a settlement between Klein’s heirs and Jodorowsky. 2011—a Blu-ray edition with remastered image. The film returns to theaters; critics write rapturous retrospectives; film scholars include it in mandatory arthouse lists. But none of the official releases contain a disclaimer about the filming methods.
🎤 In 2000s interviews, Jodorowsky acknowledges the reality of the scenes with rabbit killings and actor trauma, but frames it as “part of the spiritual experience of production.” He publicly retracts one statement—about the alleged real rape of actress Marusidios Guerreros in one scene, calling it “surrealist advertising” he regrets. But the other evidence of violence on set remains unchallenged.
⚖️ The ethical paradox crystallizes: artistic value has served for decades as a shield against criminal liability. No human rights organization has ever filed charges against Jodorowsky for child abuse (of Brontis) or animal cruelty. The statute of limitations has expired, witnesses have scattered, and the director himself has become an icon of auteur cinema—invited to festival juries, studied by students, while his production methods remain footnotes.
🎬 Today, El Topo is available on streaming platforms like Criterion Channel and MUBI—with a 7.3/10 on IMDb and “must-see” status in arthouse guides. Brontis Jodorowsky, the same seven-year-old boy from the desert, became an actor and in 2024 appeared in his father’s film Psychomagic, a Healing Art—the cycle of trauma closed.
🏛️ In 2019, the British Film Institute (BFI) held a Jodorowsky retrospective without a single mention of filming methods in the program notes. In 2023, the Cannes Film Festival awarded the director an honorary Palme d’Or for his contribution to cinema. None of the ceremonies included a discussion on production ethics—the question remains off-screen, like those rabbits whose deaths no one counted.
🔬 Modern animal welfare organizations, such as the American Humane Association, have been mandatory on Hollywood film sets involving animals since 1980. But El Topo, shot in 1970 in Mexico without international oversight, remains a monument to an era when art answered to no law. A film preaching the path of nonviolence was built on bones and burns—and culture accepted this bargain in silence.