I’m sitting here, months before this review is scheduled to be posted (darn embargoes) and I’m positively buzzing. It might be the second full batch of French Press coffee I’m drinking, but I think it’s something else coursing through my veins. As I just wrote on Twitter: Damn. This is why I love the horror genre. And I need to write about it right now, months before I can post this, because I barely took a single damn note while this movie had me under its spell.

Let’s just get it out of the way: If I could have included this in my list of movies to watch for the Cinepocalypse Film Festival, it would have been my number one pick for the show. Hands down. Art, metal, blood, sex and addiction mix to psychedelic insanity in Joe Begos’s Bliss.

And I am here for it.

It begins with neon-splattered credits and “Revolt” by The Nymphs thumping in the background. This punk/rock-themed opening sets the tone for the rest of the movie, which is draped in neon and black light and punk rock glam. The credits dissolve into a scene of an artist struggling to paint a blood red mural. The artist is Dezzy (Dora Madison) and she’s suffering from painter’s block.

She’s behind on her rent, throwing it back at her landlord: “They’re fucking me. I’m fucking you. We’re all fucking fucked! I know it’s shitty. Work with me!” Then she’s dropped by her agent because she’s late on an extension of being late. Life is just royally fucking her right now and she’s been off drugs for three months, but now it’s like fuck it. We’re all fucking fucked, right? Might as well enjoy it.

So she calls up her dealer Hadrian (Graham Skipper), whose living room is drenched in green neon, giving everyone a sickly hue. Hadrian has this new drug called Diablo and this Bliss promises to knock Dezzy on her ass…which it does as day turns to night and the quiet house turns into a monstrous and raucous party filled with loud, pulsating rock. The drug has thawed her icy and abrasive exterior and turns her into a hedonistic and sexual being. Hadrian’s room is filled with neon red, bathing her in purples and reds. It’s bisexual lighting, which turns into a bisexual threesome that morphs into something else when one of the participants named Courtney (Tru Collins) bites her throat. In a hazy sequence, edited to perfection by Josh Ethier, pain, ecstasy and drugs collide in a drug-fueled orgy of disaffected lust.

The next morning, she’s alone with no apparent wound and she barely remembers the night before. But the music and the art flows through her and she attacks her blood red painting with rock-infused gusto. “Something came over me and I don’t remember doing it…It’s like I was possessed…It’s gonna be my masterpiece,” she tells her long-suffering lover Clive (Jeremy Gardner). She’s hooked on the ecstasy of the night before and before you know it, we’re following her downward spiral of vampirism, drugs and addiction. Addiction to drugs, sure. But also the artist’s addiction to create. To get that juiced feeling of creation that fuels every artist. It’s just another drug, after all. “I need to feel what I felt last night. I need it. I need it. I need it. I need it…” Dezzy coos in a hazy repetition as addiction slowly takes over.

Vampirism has been used many times as a metaphor for addiction, but never to such gruesome and psychedelic effect as Begos wields in Bliss. His vampirism comes in spurts. Feral and abrupt. And so bloody. So while the story begins as a Mumblegore with its mix of naturalistic dialogue overtaking plot and a focus on relationships of aimless and disaffected twenty/thirty year olds, it soon becomes something else; blood-soaked and horrific. As the story progresses, the 70s and 80s grindhouse inspired psychedelia becomes more and more pronounced, providing an analogy of Dezzy’s own descent into hell.

As Dezzy becomes more and more addicted to the feeling that a mix of blood and Bliss gives her, the cinematography by Mike Testin and Josh’s editing becomes a pulsating wave that just carried me along. It’s a kaleidoscope of imagery and music that throbs. It grabs you and pulls you along its death-ridden path.

When Bliss rounds into the third act, Begos’s knack for practical effects and blood kicks into overdrive and what was once a sensual orgy of sights and sounds turns demonic and red-drenched. The idea of artists possessed to create their masterpiece was mined in the also rock-infused Devil’s Candy a few years ago, but Bliss takes it one step further. Dezzy’s life turns into moments of complete blackout euphoria and crushing withdrawals.

I fucking loved this movie. If you let it sink its teeth in you, it’ll grab you and take you on a bliss-lined path to hell. It’s filmmaking like this that makes me giddy about horror.