I’ve been fascinated with trepanation, the act of drilling a hole in the skull, since I was fourteen years old. Immersed in lists of most disturbing movies on cracked dot com, scouring the internet for as of yet untapped icebergs of gore and effed up movies, I stumbled upon a film with an incredible title. Heartbeat In The Brain. What I read was shocking, that someone would not only want to drill a hole in their head but advocate for others to do the same. The concept deeply disturbed my adolescent mind, and as much as I tried I could never quite get it out of the corners of my imagination.
Over ten years later, my predilections remain much the same. I have a playlist dedicated to songs about holes in the head1, and as I write this a custom made screenprint of Amanda Feilding looms over me. I’ve never had the desire to drill a hole in my own skull, not yet anyway, but below are five films from my Letterboxd list I Need You Like A Hole In The Head that have encouraged me to think further about the self surgery and ways in which we can all let the pressure out.
Brains Repaired (Émile Cohl, 1911)
Maybe this is cheating. Brains Repaired isn’t a film about trepanation but rather a cartoonish look at what the inside of the brain might look like if you subscribed to Freud’s unquestioned research in the early 20th century. It sits on this list purely because the film is an insight into what the body could be, rather than the limits of what the body is.
Naked England (Vittorio De Sisti, 1969)
An obscure mondo film, so unknown that I have only ever seen it in Italian with Japanese subtitles. I do not speak Italian, but the images have enough to say on their own. While most mondo films are racist and unwatchable, here the lens is turned on the English. We’re a silly bunch, I get it. More people should look at our customs of Stargazey Pie, maypoles and setting barrels of tar on fire then running through the streets with them with confusion.
Naked England contains one scene in which Amanda Feilding, discussed in the next entry, is depicted. She drills a hole into her head, and while I cannot understand what the narrator says about her I can only assume they are mocking her endeavors. Though the trepanation only takes place in one scene, it is strange to see images that you now cannot see at all being recreated and made fun of.
Heartbeat In The Brain (Amanda Feilding, 1971)
My holy grail of lost cinema, despite not being a lost film. Just one that its creator won’t allow to be seen. Heartbeat In The Brain documents Amanda Feilding’s successful self trepanation. Filmed by her partner at time Joe Mellen, author of trepanation autobiography The Bore Hole, she drills a hole into her skull, hangs out with her pet pigeon and possibly eats steak.
The only person I know for sure who has seen Heartbeat In The Brain in recent memory is an ex-Vice journalist named Hamilton Morris. At one point, as an overly ambitious young programmer, I was convinced that I would be the one to screen it for an audience who would be bowled over at my prowess for obscure cinema. It was screened at London’s ICA and New York’s Suydam Gallery in the late 1970s, while a screening that was due to take place at the ICA in 2011 was cancelled last minute. Feilding was understandably cagey about the film being shown outside of select audiences chosen by her. Nonetheless, I remain fascinated by Heartbeat In The Brain and I hope to see it one day.
Amanda Feilding passed away in 2025, for reasons unrelated to the hole in her head. There are no known plans to release the film to the general public.
A Hole In The Head (Eli Kabillio, 1998)
A Hole In The Head is perhaps the closest one can currently come to seeing Heartbeat In The Brain. This documentary includes a wide range of interviews with those who have successfully trepanned themselves for all kinds of purposes, as well as footage from Heartbeat In The Brain! I’m not sure I can exactly recommend A Hole In The Head in the traditional sense, but if this list has piqued your interest and you want to see the medical benefits of trepanning explored without criticism then look no further!
Brainjacked (Andrew Allan, 2009)
Brainjacked sits in an alternative cyberpunk universe, where drilling a hole in your skull may not get you “permanently high” as Joe Mellen suggested but where it can be the cure to migraines and the key to mind control. Low budget, this film seems almost designed to be banished to the bowels of TUBI and of interest only to someone with an a priori investment in depictions of trepanning on screen. This is to say, I am the sole audience for Brainjacked. Although it may not be medically accurate, little on this list is, and Brainjacked is a welcome addition to the slim canon of films that use trepanation as a form of body horror.
- *The playlist currently consists of two songs: Prince’s Anotherloverholenyohead and Nine Inch Nail’s Head Like A Hole. I welcome any suggestions, please write to me milesmolly1@gmail.com ↩︎
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