Hopper, a homeless Vietnam veteran crippled with PTSD is picked up off the streets under the wing of a charismatic undercover CIA agent, Reese, promising him a newly repaired mind. However, the true horror ensues when Hopper is ushered into a ramshackle lodge, where a sequence of unsettling events, from a forced makeover to hypnotic manipulation, intensifies his trauma with alarming consequences.
Director’s Vision for ‘MK Ultra Violence’
MK Ultra Violence is a culmination in what I consider all things equally fascinating and horrifying that is embedded in American history (and our collective psyche) of the past 70 years. I’ve always been a fan of late 1960s American culture, with the explosion of music, cinema, and literature acting as a proverbial middle finger to the institutions and establishments of America. Yet, as time passes and history slowly reveals itself to us, a sense of paranoia and conspiracy seems to be embedded in this time, even down to the celluloid of these films, from the brutal finale of Easy Rider to the distrust of political power in The Parallax View. With this short, I manifested these obsessions of mine and tried to exercise a paranoid political horror film that morphs into a bloody slasher by the very end, and hope to explore this fuse with more films like it in the future.
