1:52 PM
Hollywood in 1967 was undergoing a transformation. The old studio system was fading, the counterculture was expanding, LSD had moved from laboratories into popular culture, and exploitation filmmakers were paying very close attention.
Enter The Acid Eaters.
Directed by Byron Mabe and produced by exploitation veteran David F. Friedman, the film follows a group of weekend thrill-seekers into a psychedelic landscape of sex, hallucinations and increasingly surreal imagery, including its famous LSD pyramid.
The movie was advertised as “the first Hollywood underground film.”
That's a great tagline. As film history, it deserves some scrutiny.
By 1967, American underground cinema was already well established. Experimental filmmakers, independent productions and countercultural screenings existed far outside Hollywood's conventional distribution system. Calling The Acid Eaters the “first” therefore tells us less about chronology than it does about a remarkable cultural moment.
The underground had become marketable.
Exploitation filmmakers recognized an audience that mainstream Hollywood was still struggling to understand. Psychedelia, sexual liberation, drugs and anti-establishment imagery weren't simply cultural developments; they could sell tickets.
Nearly sixty years later, The Acid Eaters is receiving treatment nobody making a quick exploitation picture in 1967 could reasonably have expected. American Genre Film Archive and Something Weird have restored the film from its original 35mm camera negative, pairing it with Mabe's Space Thing for a new release.
That restoration represents a broader reconsideration of exploitation cinema. Movies once regarded as disposable grindhouse product are increasingly being preserved as cultural artifacts—films that captured attitudes, anxieties and visual experiments respectable Hollywood sometimes avoided.
Was The Acid Eaters really the first Hollywood underground film?
Probably not.
But the advertisement itself may tell the better story.
By 1967, Hollywood's outer edges had discovered the underground.
And they knew there was an audience waiting there.
By the way- it's hot out - wouldn't you like to make slushies?
