Film

Scorpio Rising

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  • Strange

Scorpio Rising is a 28-minute avant-garde film that assembles biker culture, occult imagery, and pop music into something hypnotic and unsettling. It's visual collage as provocation: less narrative than fever dream. For those curious about experimental cinema's power to disturb and seduce simultaneously, and willing to sit with ambiguity.

TMDb rating3.3

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you like films built like a collage of pop songs, rituals and found images, where rhythm does the storytelling and half an hour hits harder than most plots.

Skip it if you need a story to follow or characters to settle into; this is cut in rapid, hypnotic bursts, with no dialogue to anchor you.

What it asks of you: Half an hour of attention, mostly eyes and ears: brief, dense, and deliberately jarring, with images that repeat and collide rather than unfold.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Kustom Kar Kommandos1965

Another Anger film, shorter and even purer—a single hot rod shot in glorious colour, set to music, asking what desire and obsession look like when you strip away plot entirely.

But It's essentially one static image for six minutes. If you need narrative momentum, this will feel like punishment.

Kustom Kar Kommandos poster

Chelsea Girls1966

Warhol's split-screen epic captures the Factory underground in real time, with the same fearless gaze at taboo that animates Scorpio Rising, but stretched to three hours.

But It's deliberately tedious in places. Warhol wants to bore you into seeing differently, which can just feel like being bored.

Chelsea Girls poster

Meshes of the Afternoon1943

Maya Deren's dreamlike classic predates Anger but shares his obsession with visual symbolism, ritual, and the space between image and meaning. A masterclass in what cinema can do without dialogue.

But At 14 minutes it's dense; watching it demands the same surrendered attention you'd give meditation or psychoanalysis.

Meshes of the Afternoon poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Scorpio Rising

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Marjorie Morningstar1958

Both films are obsessed with the aesthetics of youth and the performance of identity, but Marjorie Morningstar hides beneath convention what Scorpio Rising screams aloud. Watch them back-to-back and see how the subtext of one becomes the text of the other.

A glossy, conventional 1950s musical about youth and rebellion, but shot by Michael Curtiz with a visual sophistication that accidentally mirrors Anger's obsession with ritual, appearance, and what's hidden beneath surface charm.

But It's earnest and uncool in a way that will feel dated. The narrative is romantic melodrama, not visionary abstraction.

Marjorie Morningstar poster
More like this (8)

Fireworks1947

Anger's own breakthrough, even shorter than Scorpio Rising, more explicitly sexual, shot in one night on a shoestring. Raw, urgent, the blueprint for everything that follows.

But The sexual content is graphic for 1947 and remains confrontational. It's not erotic—it's angry, which some will find more disturbing.

Fireworks poster

Carnival of Souls1962

A low-budget horror film with the same grainy texture and dreamlike logic as Scorpio Rising, where atmosphere overwhelms plot. Genuinely uncanny without relying on gore or jump scares.

But It moves slowly and nothing you'd call an 'action scene' occurs. Patience required; payoff is mood, not incident.

Carnival of Souls poster

Performance.1970

Roeg and Cammell's hallucinogenic crime film pairs masculine aggression with occult imagery and sexual transgression, shot with the same formal daring Anger brought to the underground.

But It's deliberately enigmatic and won't explain itself. Some sequences seem designed to alienate rather than entertain.

Performance. poster

The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome1954

Anger's own earlier masterpiece, gorgeously hand-tinted, thick with mythic and occult references. If you respond to Scorpio Rising, this is essential Anger.

But At 40 minutes it requires sustained attention; it moves at its own pace and won't compromise for restless viewers.

The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome poster

Flaming Creatures1963

Jack Smith's anarchic, deliberately trashy vision of underground desire predates Scorpio by a year. Same transgressive energy, rawer production values, equal weirdness.

But It's chaotic and sometimes hard to parse. Some find it liberatory; others find it simply chaotic.

Flaming Creatures poster

Blow Job1964

Warhol's provocation filmed in real time, same year as Scorpio Rising. A technical experiment and moral challenge rolled into one 35-minute stare.

But It's exactly what the title promises, nothing more. If that concept doesn't intrigue you, there is no reason to watch it.

Blow Job poster

Masculin Féminin1966

Both films argue that meaning lives in the cut, not in plot or character. Scorpio Rising does it instinctively; Précis does it analytically. Together they show you how montage creates subtext.

A contemporary essay film that decomposes Hollywood montage into its elemental parts: how cutting, music, and imagery create meaning and emotion. It's what Anger was doing in 1964, but with digital fluency and theoretical clarity.

But It's academic in its approach. Viewers expecting visceral provocation will find intellectual deconstruction instead.

Masculin Féminin poster

Suspiria1977

Both films prove that cinema's power lies in sensory overload and ritual repetition rather than dramatic arc. Anger influenced Argento's understanding that a feeling can be more important than a story.

Dario Argento's colour-saturated horror film uses music, imagery, and atmosphere exactly as Anger does—not to tell but to infect. The plot barely matters; the visual and sonic texture is the entire point.

But It's visually gorgeous but narratively slack. Some will find the detached style cold or pretentious rather than hypnotic.

Suspiria poster

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Recommended by

The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, The Cool and the Crazy, Kustom Kar Kommandos, The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Blonde Cobra