The Worst Movies to Watch When You're Stoned

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Oh, you think, I’ll just watch a colorful, stupid cartoon and laugh and eat cereal. Wrong. You’ll spend the next hour trying to unpack this movie’s critique of American capitalism. Why are they trying to indoctrinate children into the bureaucratic system? How can these babies fucking talk? Why was this nominated for an Oscar? Is this some sort of conspiracy that’s connected, in part, to 30 Rock and Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy? Are the Boss Baby and Jack Donaghy the same character? Why are parents showing this movie to their children? Shit, have I really only been watching this for 10 minutes?

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I’ve attempted to watch Inland Empire a total of one time. Complete with an old woman speaking in riddles about a “brutal fucking murder,” the shaky hand camcorder, the random people in rabbit heads, the sudden unsettling laugh track—this film is absolutely terrifying. To be completely honest, it was a few years until I could even watch a David Lynch movie again. You’ll question your own sanity and grasp of reality. Lynch will make something as mundane as Laura Dern cheering about getting a role in a movie somehow creepy as hell. Good luck trying to follow this sober or stoned, anyway.

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Jim Carrey is a sad man who is dealing with a breakup from Kate Winslet by having his memories of her erased. But good luck trying to keep track of all of that when you’re trying to make sense of scenes of Jim Carrey masturbating or as a giant baby. A combination to absolutely avoid when watching a movie stoned is anything that will: blur the line between reality, memory, and fact; confuse you; and depress the hell out of you.

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You’ll find that movies about drugs are typically the worst movies to watch while on drugs. But Transpotting is especially difficult thanks largely in part to the visual stunts created by Danny Boyle. There’s the scene in which Ewan McGregor crawls through a toilet, the moment when a first-person perspective sinks into the carpet after taking a hit, the dead baby—all images that are guaranteed to freak you the hell out if you’re even a little bit high. Plus, it’s filthy—it’s just a really dirty movie. You’ll never be clean again, will you? Is this the path you’re going down, now that you’re experimenting with a gateway drug like marijuana? Is this movie just some sort of elaborate anti-drug campaign? [Turns off TV and takes 45-minute shower]

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This is a beautiful and tragic movie about Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered a catastrophic stroke at age 43 that left him unable to move anything except for blinking one eye. The film follows Bauby as he dictates his memoir of the same name using the eye-blinking method. But if you want to spend 112 minutes feeling paralyzed in your own way, trapped inside this man’s own locked-in syndrome and contemplating how much you’ve taken the ability to walk and speak for granted, then go ahead and watch this high. It’s a movie that does such a good job building viewer empathy that you feel like you’re actually there. And good luck keeping up with the subtitles. Just watch this sober while in a very stable time of your life.

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Do you have claustrophobia? Oh well—sorry, buddy: You do now. Horror movies are hard in general to watch high. But, what makes The Descent even harder than most to watch while stoned is that this isn’t a movie that’s built upon jump scares. It’s more of a psychological horror, one that crams you into tight spaces while trying to escape from underground monsters. Good luck ever feeling comfortable in an elevator again.

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By the time you get to the baby-eating scene of Mother!, you’ll wish you hadn’t sat through the whole bleeding house and random murder thing. I’m just going to take this moment to point out that you just shouldn’t watch any Darren Aronofsky movie high.

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Do you want to be sobbing like a child during Jessie’s “When Somebody Loved Me” song? Do you want to feel crippling guilt for all the childhood toys you’ve abandoned to live out the rest of their days alone in basement boxes? That’s a hard no.