"I've wanted to believe it. But I've felt Michael's presence, behind these walls, just like all those years ago. Plotting, staring, staring. Waiting for some signal. I can't go through this again, not alone. Please, as my colleague, as my friend. Help me."

"After my stroke six years ago they practically had to hold a pistol to my head to get me to retire. But things are different now. I'm different. I've buried the ghosts, I've buried them in this manuscript. I don't want to practice medicine anymore."

"(last words before Michael finally killed her) You can't have the baby, Michael. You can't have the baby."

"Beth, look out! There's someone in the room! He's right behind you!"

"I'm across the street. I can see you. Beth, I want you to listen to me. Get Tim and get out of that house right now."

"Michael's work isn't done in Haddonfield. And soon, very soon, there come home to kill again. But this time, I'll be ready."

"My name's Tommy. I was only eight years old when I saw him. But I was one of the lucky ones. I survived."

"John Larroquette - X-Ray technician"

"Mark Moses - Doctor"

"Kiernan Shipka - Jodie"

"Christopher Meloni - Frank"

"Emily VanCamp - Kate"

"Piper Perabo - Bobby"

"Chris Pine - Brian"

"Lou Taylor Pucci - Danny"

"The rules are simple. You break them, you die..."

"I don't know if there's anybody listening... but, my generator is dying. So, if there is someone out there, this my last call. This is Laura Merkin, last survivor of Corpus Christi, Texas, saying goodbye."

"[Danny has just found out Bobby is infected, and is viewing a memorial at a gas station] Do you want to end up like them? We will if she stays."

"I drive, and wait for a storm to come and wash us all away. But it doesn't. It's a beautiful day. And it shouldn't be a beautiful day. I wait... but nothing happens to me. And for the first time, I feel like I am alone in the world. We made it. Two strangers with nothing left to say. Brian used to love this place. The hotel, the beach- they still look exactly the same. But they're just places now. I don't know what'll happen next. I don't know how long I'll live. But I know I will be alone."

"[In a mock narration] Brian Green steps up to the tee. He needs a hole-in-one here to get to the Masters, but he's really worried about his people finding out that he's GAY! [Brian misses]Dude, my advice to you is to put the club down, wait 10 minutes... just never pick it up again."

"The rules are simple. At least that's how my brother sees it. One, avoid the infected at all costs. Their breath is highly contagious. Two, disinfect anything they've touched in the last 24 hours. Three, the sick are already dead, they can't be saved. You break the rules, you die. You follow them, you live. Maybe."

"[On being 'chosen' as immune] I'm here and they're not."

"And we wouldn't want to break any rules, right? He said, drinking his beer as he drove the stolen Mercedes ridiculously over the speed limit. And look- no hands!"

"Jack Murdock - Hector Orteco"

"George Gaynes - Dr. Wissenschaft"

"Altered States is one hell of a movie — literally. It hurls its characters headlong back through billions of years to the moment of creation and finds nothing there except an anguished scream of "No!" as the life force protests its moment of birth. And then, through the power of the human ego to insist on its own will even in the face of the implacable indifference of the universe, it turns "No!" into "Yes!" and ends with the basic scene in all drama, the man and the woman falling into each other's arms. But hold on just a second here: I'm beginning to sound like the movie's characters, a band of overwrought pseudo-intellectuals who talk like a cross between Werner Erhard, Freud, and Tarzan. Some of the movie's best dialogue passages are deliberately staged with everybody talking at once: It doesn't matter what they're saying, only that they're incredibly serious about it. I can tell myself intellectually that this movie is a fiendishly constructed visual and verbal roller coaster, a movie deliberately intended to overwhelm its audiences with sensual excess. I know all that, and yet I was overwhelmed, I was caught up in its headlong energy."

"Charles White-Eagle - The Brujo"

"Peter Brandon - Alan Hobart"

"Dori Brenner - Sylvia Rosenberg"

"Miguel Godreau - Primal man"

"Megan Jeffers - Grace Jessup"

"Drew Barrymore - Margaret Jessup"

"Thaao Penghlis - Eduardo Echeverria"

"Charles Haid - Mason Parrish"

"Bob Balaban - Arthur Rosenberg"

"Blair Brown - Emily Jessup"

"William Hurt - Dr. Edward "Eddie" Jessup"

"In the basement of a university medical school Dr. Jessup floats naked in total darkness. The most terrifying experiment in the history of science is out of control... and the subject is himself."

"When he heard his cry for help it wasn't human."

"If it is not wholly visionary at every juncture, it is at least dependably — even exhilaratingly — bizarre. Its strangeness, which borders cheerfully on the ridiculous, is its most enjoyable feature. The movie itself has many of the qualities of its chief character, who is obsessive, exciting, scary, wildly energetic, and a very odd bird indeed. Actually his leanings are more to the ape-like than the birdlike, and to call them leanings is to put it very mildly. … The movie, part joke and part nightmare, is the story of a man who experiments with hallucinogenic substances, searching for what he calls his unborn soul and longing to re-experience the birth of man. In the course of this adventure, he turns into an ape and scares the daylights out of everyone around him. Really, that's all you need to know. … The film is in fine shape as long as it revels in its own craziness, making no claims on the viewer's reason. But when it asks you to believe that what you're watching may really be happening, and to wonder what it means, it is asking far too much. By the time it begins straining for an ending both happy and hysterical, it has lost all of its mystery, and most of its magic."

"The scene in which the scientist becomes cosmic energy and his wife grabs him and brings him back to human form is straight out of my Dyadic Cyclone (1976) … As for the scientist's regression into an ape-like being, the late Dr. Craig Enright, who started me on K (ketamine) while taking a trip with me here by the isolation tank, suddenly "became" a chimp, jumping up and down and hollering for twenty-five minutes. Watching him, I was frightened. I asked him later, "Where the hell were you?" He said, "I became a pre-hominid, and I was in a tree. A leopard was trying to get me. So I was trying to scare him away." The manuscript of The Scientist (1978) was in the hands of Bantam, the publishers. The head of Bantam called and said, "Paddy Chayefsky would like to read your manuscript. Will you give him your permission?" I said, "Only if he calls me and asks permission." He didn't call. But he probably read the manuscript."

"During the professor's last experiment, when he is disappearing into a violent whirlpool of light and screams on the laboratory floor, it is his wife who wades into the celestial mists, gets up to her knees in eternity, reaches in, and pulls him out. And this is despite the fact that he has filed for divorce. The last scene is a killer, with the professor turning into the protoplasm of life itself, and his wife turning into a glowing shell of rock-like flesh, with her inner fires glowing through the crevices (the effect is something like an overheated Spiderman). They're going through the unspeakable hell of reliving the First Moment, and yet as the professor, as Man, bangs on the walls and crawls toward her, and she reaches out, and the universe rocks, the Man within him bursts out of the ape-protoplasm, and the Woman within her explodes back into flesh, and they collapse into each other's arms, and all the scene really needs at that point is for him to ask, "Was it as good for you as it was for me?" Altered States is a superbly silly movie, a magnificent entertainment, and a clever and brilliant machine for making us feel awe, fear, and humor. That is enough. It's pure movie and very little meaning. Did I like it? Yeah, I guess I did, but I wouldn't advise trying to think about it very deeply."

"The movie is based on a Paddy Chayefsky novel, which was, in turn, inspired by the experiments of Dr. John Lilly, the man who placed his human subjects in total immersion tanks — floating them in total darkness so that their minds, cut off from all external reality, could play along the frontiers of sanity. In Altered States, William Hurt plays a Harvard scientist named Jessup who takes such an experiment one step further, by ingesting a drug made from the sacred hallucinatory mushrooms of a primitive tribe. The strange thing about these mushrooms, Hurt observes in an easily missed line of dialogue in the movie, is that they give everyone who takes them the same hallucinatory vision. Perhaps it is our cellular memory of creation: There is chaos, and then a ball of light, and then the light turns into a crack, and the crack opens onto Nothing, and that is all there was and all there will be, except for life, which has its only existence in the mind. Got that? It hardly matters. It is a breathtaking concept, but Altered States hardly slows down for it. This is the damnedest movie to categorize. Just when it begins to sound like a 1960s psychedelic fantasy, a head trip — it turns into a farce."

"This one has everything: sex, violence, comedy, thrills, tenderness. It's an anthology and apotheosis of American pop movies: Frankenstein, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Nutty Professor, 2001, Alien, Love Story. It opens at fever pitch and then starts soaring—into genetic fantasy, into a precognitive dream of delirium and delight. Madness is its subject and substance, style and spirit. The film changes tone, even form, with its hero's every new mood and mutation. It expands and contracts with his mind until both almost crack. It keeps threatening to go bonkers, then makes good on its threat, and still remains as lucid as an aerialist on a high wire. It moves with the loping energy of a crafty psychopath, or of film makers gripped with the potential of blowing the moviegoer's mind out through his eyes and ears. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Altered States."

"Defy it, Eddie. You made it real. You can make it unreal. If you love me... If you love me, Eddie, DEFY IT!"

"He's a truth lover. Reality to Eddie is only that which is changeless, immutably constant. What happened to Eddie tonight, that was Eddie's idea of love. That was consummation. He finally - got it off with God. He finally embraced the absolute, was finally ravished by truth and it goddamn near destroyed him."

"He doesn't love me. He never loved me. I was never real to him. Nothing in the human experience is real to him."

"You are a Faust-freak, Eddie! You'd sell your soul to find the great truth. Well, human life doesn't have great truths. We're born in doubt. We spend our lives persuading ourselves we're alive. And one way we do that is we love each other."

"Sex is a mystical experience for you. You carry on like a flagellant which can be very nice, but l sometimes wonder if it's me that's being made love to. I feel like I'm being harpooned by some raging monk in the act of receiving God."

"Of all the God damn men in this world, why do I have to love this one? I can't get him out of me. Do you know how many men I tried to fall in love with this past year? But it won't work. No matter who I'm in bed with I have to imagine it's him or nothing happens. No matter who I'm eating with or walking with there's always this pain because it isn't him. I'm possessed by him."