30+ Movies to Watch While You’re High
Here are the best movies to watch while high đ˝ď¸đż

Some movies are simply weird or trippy or just so bad they are good. One doesnât need to be high to enjoy such movies, although you can watch them completely sober and wind up feeling high.
The movies on this list are a little different than weird or trippy movies in the sense that drugsâusually marijuanaâplay a crucial role in the plot, and by smoking weed before watching the film, viewers feel more like participants than passive observers. Many of these films are also steeped in the drug lore surrounding marijuana.

Then again, a minority of these filmsâsuch as Fantasia and 2001: A Space Odysseyâmake no direct references to marijuana or drug use, but their psychedelic imagery attracted stoners to the extent that they âadoptedâ them as movies that must be watched while high.
Which leads to another questionâif someone has to be high to enjoy the movie, does that mean it wouldnât be a very good movie if you watched it while sober? Thatâs a deep philosophical question, and you may need to smoke a few joints while you read about the movies on this list.
Best Movies to Watch While High
Reefer Madness (1936)

If paranoia about communism was known as the Red Scare, movies such as Reefer Madness were are the forefront of the Green Scare, a wave of over-the-top misinformation about the Demon Weed that warned anyone who even took a puff would become a hopelessly insane and possibly murderous addict. The film’s basic plot involves a trio of weed dealers who lure impressionable teens into smoking âreeferâ cigarettes and the absolute ruination of their lives that naturally follows. The film was partially based on the real-life story of Victor Licata, a young man who axe-murdered his family in 1933 and was found to be under the influence of marijuana when he committed the crime. Itâs pretty clear in retrospect that Licata was a schizophrenic with homicidal tendencies, but publicity around his crime led to the federal Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which outlawed sales of weed in the USA. The filmâs propaganda was so overwrought, hippies started flocking to midnight screenings of Reefer Madness in the 1970s just to get high and laugh. TimeOut writes, âIt’s basically a lousily made film, but the one-dimensional ‘vice’ and portentous didacticism more than make up for that. One of the most absurdly earnest exercises in paranoia you’ll ever have the good fortune to see.â
Fantasia (1940)

This was another movie like 2001: A Space Odyssey that was not directly intended as a âmovie to watch while youâre highâ but that pot-smoking and acid-dropping hippies latched onto due to its incredible mixture of animation and classical music. Choosing Fantasia as one of â20 Movies to Watch While Youâre Stoned,â the LA Weekly wrote, âWalt Disney’s experimental extravaganza brings together animation and classical music. Beethoven, Stokowski, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky. Hippos in tutus performing ballet, dancing flowers, [and] Mickey Mouse having a helluva time with mops and buckets.â
Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (1966)

An absolute mess of a film that can only begin to make sense if youâre highâand even if youâre high, it makes no sense at all. Director Ray Dennis Steckler was known for such cinematic abortions as The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, but he outdid (or âunder-didâ?) himself with this Grade-Z production that he claimed cost only $20 to make. According to legend, the typographer who rendered the opening titles misspelled the word âandâ in the original title, Rat Pfink and Boo Boo, but Steckler claimed they didnât have the $50 to correct the typo, so it stuck. (Steckler also later claimed that this was a lie and that his young daughter kept chanting âRat Pfink a Boo Boo,â and he liked the way it sounded.) Barely an hour long and shot in black and white with NO natural ambient dialogueâany time you hear a character âspeaking,â the dialogue is dubbed inâit starts out as a gritty crime drama where a trio of thugs seek to abduct and hold a rock starâs girlfriend named Cee Bee Beaumont (Stecklerâs real-life wife, Carolyn Brandt) for ransom. Then, feeling as if the film was going nowhere, Steckler abruptly changed gears and made it a comic-book superhero movie where Rat Pfink and Boo Boo (two caped crusaders based on Batman and Robin as well as the mid-60sâ popularity of Ed Rothâs iconic âRat Finkâ cartoon character) seek to rescue Cee Bee not only from the thugs, but from a gorilla named Kogar. The film is peppered throughout with surprisingly catchy rock music. Indie Film Cafe writes, âFor pure silly, whimsical fun, its really hard to beat this oddball whackadoodle comedy superhero movie featuring hot (for 1963) singer Lonnie Lord and mild mannered gardener Titus stepping into a closet to become the mighty Rat Pfink and Boo Boo!â
Yellow Submarine (1968)

In a vividly psychedelic animated feature inspired in equal parts by marijuana culture and LSD culture, The Beatles travel in the eponymous Yellow Submarine deep into Pepperland, a mystical wonderworld deep beneath the sea. A group of music-hating killers known as Blue Meanies seek to eradicate all music from Pepperland, and this is one injustice The Beatles will not tolerate. Roger Ebert writes, âYellow Submarine was also embraced as a âhead movie,â leading to an observation attributed to Ken Kesey: âThey say it looks better when you’re stoned. But that’s true of all movies.ââ
Head (1968)

Marketed as âa movie for a turned-on audienceââmeaning an audience that was high on illicit substancesâthis is the film that essentially destroyed the career of The Monkees, AKA âThe American Beatles.â Whereas they were mostly known as an untalented pop group who sang insubstantial ditties and didnât even play their own instruments, Head tosses The Monkees into a deep psychedelic stew of surrealist head-tripping. The screenplay was written by Jack Nicholson, and Head was produced and directed by the team of Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, who had created The Monkees hit TV show. Some speculate that the film was so weird, it was purposely intended to wreck The Monkeesâ career. Roger Ebert writes, âI suppose it flopped in 1968 because Monkees fans were offended by it, and non-Monkees fans (i.e., anyone over 14, in either age or IQ) devoutly stayed away.â
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Director Stanley Kubrickâs game-changing foray into science fiction is considered by many to be one of the greatest films ever made. The basic âplotâ involves the trajectory of human life from apes all the way to a transcendent future beyond Homo sapiens, with some dark drama in between involving a malevolent AI computer. The filmâs last half hour is essentially a nonstop psychedelic head trip, which is what rallied hordes of hippies to flock to this film, which was marketed as the ultimate trio. Reel Views calls it âa cold, majestic motion picture, a movie that seeks to remind us of the vastness of space and our relatively insignificant place in it. Kubrick’s intention with 2001 was not to thrill us with battles and pyrotechnics, but to daunt us with the realization of how much there is that we do not understand.â
Easy Rider (1969)

A hippie classic in which drugs play a prominent role. Director Dennis Hopper plays Billy, a scruffy biker who along with Captain America (Peter Fonda) set along on a journey from the West Coast to New Orleans after pocketing the money from a huge cocaine sale they made to an eccentric man (legendary record producer Phil Spector) in a Rolls-Royce on an airplane runway. As they travel through America, they visit hippie communes, get arrested in Texas for interrupting a parade, smoke plenty of weed with an alcoholic lawyer (Jack Nicholson) that they met in jail, and get increasingly harassed by intolerant locals as they plunge further into the Deep South. In New Orleans during Mardi Gras, they drop LSD with a pair of prostitutes (Karen Black and Tony Basil). Far Out magazine writes, âThe film already contained scenes where the characters participated in smoking joints, but many thought that it wasnât actually marijuana. It was later confirmed by the stars of the film, like Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson, that the entire crew was using something or the order. Fonda recalled: âEveryone had their [medication] of choice on Easy Rider. [Hopper] had his drink, [Nicholson] smoked joints, and the crew dabbled with acid and dope.â Since it was a Dennis Hopper project, this should come as no surprise as the man has done far more intense things like searching for death in a Mexican jungle and shooting up a tree while high on LSD, for example.â
El Topo (1970)

An extremely gory and trippy take on the Spaghetti Western genre by surrealist Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, El Topo achieved a wide theatrical run and loads of controversy after John Lennon of The Beatles publicly declared his admiration for it. The lead characterânamed âEl Topoâ and played by the directorâtravels through the desert on horseback and leaves a trail of blood and guts in his wake. Roger Ebert writes, âEl Topo is a picaresque journey past the principal myths and symbols of human culture, shot in the style of an incredibly bloody, violent Italian Western. People are going to it for all sorts of reasons. As a greasy, grimy, gore-dripping Western, it works just fine, and not even the early Clint Eastwood films had so much sweat and sadism.â
The Holy Mountain (1973)

Jodorowskyâs third film received a tremendous boost when Beatles John Lennon and George Harrison, both admirers of El Topo, helped finance the project, which was produced by Beatles manager Allen Klein. A reviewer for TimeOut writes that Jodorowskyâs approach was to âKeep the concept of cinema as a one-stop head shopâonly this time, start shoving once you reach the outer limits. Then, for good measure, add in Marxist mumbo-jumbo, amputees, hermaphrodites, astrology, cannibalism and chimpanzees; make the whole enchilada BYOC (Bring Your Own Coherence), and voila!â Basement Rejects writes, âIâve seen El Topo and Iâve seen Santa Sangre, and I know that Jodorowsky is a complete trip. You canât go into the films with any expectations (except the promise of unique visuals). While both El Topo and Santa Sangre are ‘trippy,’ The Holy Mountain takes it to another level.â
Up in Smoke (1978)

More than any other comedians in the 1960s and 1970s, the comic duo of âCheechâ Marin and Tommy Chong built a career on weed references and weed humor. In this, their debut film, Chong portrays Anthony Stoner, an unemployed rock drummer who never does much besides smoke weed and mumble incoherently. After he meets Pedro de Pacas (Cheech Marin), the two get arrested for marijuana possession but are released on a technicality, allowing them to compete in a rock-band contest at the filmâs climax. Entertainment Weekly writes, âIn their debut, Cheech & Chongâs Up in Smoke, theyâre jobless musician wannabes who flummox an authority figure (narc Stacy Keach) and get laughs from simple, otherwise meaningless gestures and exchanges (âHey, man.â âWhat?â âWhat?â âOhâ). Through encounters with cops, criminals, babes, and bozos, theyâre always there for each other.â
Cheech & Chongâs Nice Dreams (1981)

In Cheech & Chongâs third film after Up in Smoke (1978) and Cheech & Chongâs Next Movie (1980), the worldâs most famous potheads stumble across a super-potent strain of weed that just so happens to gradually turn its users into reptiles. They start selling the unique brand of weed from an ice-cream truck while evading a lawman who seeks to jail them not only for selling drugs, but for enabling the transformation of human beings into reptiles. TimeOut writes, âtheir third movie is where shit starts to get really weirdâŚ.Cue odd non-sequiturs involving characters named âHowie Hamburgerâ and âWeird Jimmyâ, an acid trip in a mental asylum, cameos from Paul Reubens and LSD pioneer Timothy Leary, and a weed strain that slowly turns consumers into lizardsâŚ.â
Dazed and Confused (1993)

The bicentennial year of 1976 may have marked the peak of drug culture and stoner culture in America, and this loving ode to that era by director Richard Linklater all takes place over the course of the last day of high school as a group of graduating seniors try to plot the course for the rest of their lives. Itâs very similar to American Graffiti in the sense that it features an ensemble cast of actors on the last day of high school attempting to figure out what comes next, but whereas American Graffiti successfully took the viewer back in time to 1961, Dazed and Confused is firmly placed in 1976. The Washington Post writes, âRichard Linklater’s satirical take on high school life in the 1970s is not only funny and entertaining. It’s practically a historic document of life during the smiley-face button era–when people wore wide-bottomed pants, listened to Edgar Winter and (to paraphrase a Dazed and Confused ad banned by the Motion Picture Association of America) actually inhaled when they smoked marijuana.â
Friday (1995)

Possibly the first blaxploitation film that also fits neatly into the stoner-movie genre, rapper Ice Cubeâs homage to a typical Friday in the âhood revolves around the character Chris Jones (Ice Cube) and his attempt to extricate his foul-mouthed friend Smokey (Chris Tucker in his breakout role) from a dangerous situation due to the fact that he owes a ruthless local weed dealer some money. According to Music Box Theatre, âAs the hours drag on, Jones and Smokey experience the gamut of urban life, complete with crackheads, shoot-outs and overly sexual pastors, concentrated into one single, unbelievable Friday.â
The Big Lebowski (1998)

The Coen Brothersâ comedy thriller revolves around Jeff âThe Dudeâ Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), a lovable, wise, and yet entirely slovenly and lazy pothead who gets mistaken for a millionaire named Lewbowski by hired thugs who wind up peeing on The Dudeâs beloved throw rug, leading The Dude on a campaign of vengeance and clarification. Roger Ebert writes, âSome may complain The Big Lebowski rushes in all directions and never ends up anywhere. That isn’t the film’s flaw, but its style. The Dude, who smokes a lot of pot and guzzles White Russians made with half-and-half, starts every day filled with resolve, but his plans gradually dissolve into a haze of missed opportunities and missed intentions.â
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)

Hunter S. Thompsonâs visionary 1971 book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas may the the best-loved book of all time in which the protagonists consume ungodly amounts of drugsâincluding a harrowing experience ingesting raw human adrenalineâwithout going completely bonkers. Johnny Depp portrays Raoul Duke and Benicio Del Toro plays his trusty lawyer friend Dr. Gonzo as the pair head to Las Vegas to cover a motorcycle race. The New York Times writes, âRevisiting Thompson’s 1971 book, the enthusiastic full-tilt stamina of the author’s alter ego, Raoul Duke, and his lawyer and partner-in-mayhem, Dr. Gonzo, is still infectious in its dated way. As they roar through Las Vegas like a pair of runaway trains, nothing derails them, even when the surrounding landscape seems to shatter into ghoulish hallucinatory shards. The pharmaceuticals they consume by the fistful seem to work as physical as well as psychic fuel for their outrageous drug-addled investigation of the garish side of the American dream at a moment when the world seems divided into two mutually hostile camps: the insolent hip and the grimly square.â
Half Baked (1998)

Thurgood (Dave Chappelle), Scarface (Guillermo Diaz), and Brian (Jim Breuer) are a trio of potheads whose friend is jailed after he accidentally kills a New York City police horse by feeding it junk food. To raise bail for their friendâs release, they break into a pharmaceutical lab, steal some high-grade weed, and try to sell it while evading the police. Saying that Chappelleâs goal with the film was to ârevive the stoner comedy,â Time Out writes, âIt had been a good while since thereâd been a movie made explicitly for potheads, by potheads, and while critics hated it, it was adopted by red-eyed â90s kids as the Up in Smoke of their generation.â
Dude, Whereâs My Car? (2000)

Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott star as a pair of hard-partying dudes who had such a fantastic time the previous night, they canât even find where they parked their car once they sober up the next morning. They attempt to retrace the previous nightâs steps, leading to all sorts of botching and bungling and misadventure. The BBC suggests that one might have to actually be high to enjoy this movie: âJesse and Chester’s Abbott-and-Costello-style routines (directionless duologues in which every other word is ‘dude’ or ‘sweet’) are painfully unamusing, and you would surely have to be on drugs yourself to make sense of a storyline which incorporates ostriches, tattoos, and a flatmate who urinates in flower pots.â
Pootie Tang (2001)

Based on a sketch from HBOâs The Chris Rock Show and with a script written by Louis C.K., the filmâs title refers to its main character, a ghetto superstar with an odd way of speaking who uses his magical belt to protect women and children in the âhood. Chris Rock has a cameo appearance as a talking corn cob. SF Gate writes, âPootie is a ghetto superstar par excellence–corny-cool right down to his cheap, tinted shades and wide-open short-sleeve shirts. He looks like a Commodore trying to get backstage at a Teena Marie-Rick James concertâŚ.The film is out to mock the place where hip-hop and blaxploitation meet. As it turns out, the shoddy assembly and low-budget sheen are its best critique of the retro-fabulousness the film is satirizing.â
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)

Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) are a pair of college roommates who get high one night and are mesmerized by a TV ad for White Castle, an extremely popular chain of low-grade burger shops across the Northeast. Beset with a vicious case of the munchies and convinced that there must be a White Castle somewhere near their North Jersey apartment, they drive into the dark wilds of the Garden State and encounter one hilarious situation after the next. Salon writes, âEven when they’re over the top, the gags in Harold & Kumar have a kind of Zen garden simplicity — they don’t demand brains or logic as much as a willingness to surrender to the corner of your brain that sometimes forgets how to spell words like âaccommodateâ and âlikability.ââ
Smiley Face (2007)

Anna Faris assumes the title role in Gregg Arakiâs film about a struggling actress who is unmotivated due to the fact that she smokes weed from the minute she wakes up in the morning to when she finally falls asleep at night. She has a busy day planned, but when she eats a potent cupcake infused with THC, she is instead set upon a path of misdirection and chaos throughout LA. A reviewer for the Village Voice writes that although he canât stand marijuana or stoner culture, he âcan say with some authority that Dylan Haggerty has written an eleventh-hour candidate for the funniest movie of 2007, that Gregg Araki has directed his finest film since 1997âs Nowhere, and that Faris, flawless, rocks their inspired idiot odyssey in a virtuoso comedic turn.â
Pineapple Express (2008)

Seth Rogen plays a stoner named Dale Denton who becomes obsessed with a super-powerful strain of weed known as Pineapple Express. But he drops a roach accidentally while witnessing a murder. When Dale and his weed dealer friend (James Franco) realize that the roach can be traced back to them and may falsely implicate them in the murder, they go on the run. A malevolent drug lord (Gary Cole) and a corrupt cop (Rosie Perez) both have their reasons for bringing the boys to justice. Roger Ebert writes, âPineapple Express has all the elements you’d expect from the genre: male bonding, immature sexual desires, verbal scatology, formidable drug abuse, fight scenes, gunfire, explosions. Yawn? Not this time. It’s a quality movie even if the material is unworthy of the treatment. As a result, yes, it’s a druggie comedy that made me laugh.â
Enter the Void (2009)

Director Gaspar NoĂŠâs nearly unwatchable 2002 film Irreversible placed him on the map as an auteur with a rare ability to evoke mind-bending levels of disgust. Enter the Void takes place in Japan, where police kill a drug dealer named Oscar, allowing viewers to witness firsthand his nightmarish descent into the afterlife. Salon writes, âThis powerful, hallucinogenic journey will strike some viewers as a flat-out masterpiece and others as flatulent garbage. It actually has elements of both, so let me issue a completely weaselly, asterisk-laden recommendation: You have to see this! If (and only if) you’re into this kind of thing!â
Samsara (2011)

Director Ron Fricke was the cinematographer for the renowned 1982 documentary Koyaanisqatsi, which was notable in that it contained no dialogue and instead was a pastiche of music and footage of natural and urban landscapes. Fricke went on to direct Chronos (1985) and Baraka (1992) in much the same vein, using sweeping cinematography and a dialogue-free approach to overwhelm the viewer in an ocean of music and images. In Samsara, Fricke and his crew traveled to five continents, capturing footage of waterfalls, the Egyptian pyramids, the Roman catacombs, and New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. DVD Infatuation writes, âShot on 70mm, Samsara, like Chronos and Baraka before it, acts as a window to the world, through which we see many interesting things. Awe-inspiring and occasionally shocking, Samsara is guaranteed to blow you away.â
This is the End (2013)

James Franco and Seth Rogenâwho were integral to the stoner classic Pineapple Expressâreturn for this apocalyptic comedy where a group of celebrities who attend a party at Francoâs house wind up trapped in his mansion after Los Angeles has been destroyed. Much of the comedy is wrought not by the groupâs struggles to survive the apocalypse, but the fact that their involuntary quarantining has forced them to take a hard look at themselves.
Inherent Vice (2015)

In Paul Thomas Andersonâs adaptation of a psychedelic novel by Thomas Pynchon, Joaquin Phoenix plays a private detective named Larry âDocâ Portello, who lives in a California beach community and tries to solve cases despite being perpetually zonked on marijuana. Reel Views writes, âThere’s slapstick, lowbrow material, and enough strange characters and âcompletely differentâ moments to make Monty Python smileâŚ.The whole of Inherent Vice takes place in the haze of smoke from the pot incessantly smoked by the lead character, private investigator Larry âDocâ Sportello (played with low-key intensity by Joaquin Phoenix). By intent, there’s not a lot of energy in the film; it’s mellow and slow-moving.â
More Movies to Watch While High

- Assassin of Youth (1938) is nearly as hysterical as the previous yearâs Reefer Madness in its insistence that even a puff of the Devilâs weed will lead one down a path of destruction.
- More (1969) focuses on heroin addiction and has a soundtrack by Pink Floyd.
- Fantastic Planet (1973) is an animated French-Czech coproduction that relies heavily on trippy imagery.
- Heavy Metal (1981) named after the graphics-intensive magazine popular in the 1970s and 1980s, this is a series of animated shorts that focus on alternative psychological states.
- Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) is perhaps best known for Sean Pennâs star-making role as Jeff Spicoli, the quintessential California stoner dude.
- Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) although light on drug references, this comedy is heavy on improbably psychedelic situations as a group of wannabe rock stars travel in time to help form the perfect band.
- Requiem for a Dream (2000) is director Darren Aronofskyâs nightmare film about the ravages of addiction.
- Higher Ed (2001) a man enters college on a track scholarship and struggles to evade the druggy lifestyle of the hood from which he came.
- How High (2001) Rap stars Redman and Method Man play a pair of stoners who wind up as students at Harvard University after smoking some suspicious weed.
- Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) Kevin Smithâs mumbling antiheroes fight a movie production that seeks to capitalize on their comic-book stoner alter egos.
- Super Troopers (2002) a group of bored and bumbling Vermont State Troopers seek to amuse themselves.
- Soul Plane (2004) hijinks and hilarity erupt when a group of entrepreneurs attempt to start an airline that caters to black people.
- Grandmaâs Boy (2006) a game designer interrupts his bitter rivalry with another game designer to focus on a girl.
- Tenacious D in: The Pick of Destiny (2006) Jack Blackâs hilarious rock band is back in a comedy about finding the âHoly Grailâ of guitar picks.
- Ted (2012) is on this list mainly because people are apt to find a talking teddy bear funnier when theyâre stoned.
- Weâre the Millers (2013) a bumbling family down on their luck must make a drug shipment from Mexico to America in order to pay off a debt.