Welcome back to The Drop In, DoubleBlind’s newsletter serving up news, culture, and independent journalism about psychedelics straight to your inbox.

Today’s story is about “The Faerie Rings,” an award-winning screenplay using the faerie tale as a vehicle to explore psychedelics, authoritarian control, and the fight for healing and cognitive liberty. It features all kinds of characters, including plant spirits as faeries (not the Disney kind; think more along the lines of “trickster”) who guide a group of rebels through a forbidden realm in search of freedom and transformation. You can read our full interview with filmmaker Zina Brown immediately below!

If you keep scrolling, you’ll find pieces on ego deaths for the 1%, our brain on drugs and Chat GPT, and the public health dangers of misleading headlines about psychedelics.

Happy Spring💧,
Mary Carreón
Editor-in-Chief

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Zina Brown’s award-winning screenplay reframes faerie lore as an allegory for the drug war, mental health, and the right to explore one’s own mind.

The truth is dangerous. At least it can feel that way now, under a deteriorating empire overseen by circus ghouls hellbent on controlling information, perception, and even access to our own healing. But that’s why storytelling — and myth, specifically — is critical to society: it becomes a workaround, creating space for ideas that can’t be said outright. 

That’s exactly what filmmaker Zina Brown is doing with “The Faerie Rings,” a live-action, feature-length film offering an allegorical statement on the current state of mental health, freedom, the drug war, environmental collapse, and psychedelic healing. He builds a mythic world that pulls from an older, darker, more original type of faerie tale — one in which the fairies stay true to their traditional archetypes: tricksters, shapeshifters, and teachers who aren’t afraid to bite. In Brown’s film, faeries are also the psychedelic plant spirits of cannabis, psilocybin mushrooms, and ayahuasca.

The story follows a boy named Simon, a disillusioned young artist living under a regime where tyrannical rulers outlaw curiosity. Then, he and his friends set out in search of forbidden portals known as “the faerie rings,” or mushroom circles that open portals into another realm. They risk everything for a glimpse into another world that’s freer, stranger, and offers an opportunity to break free from tyrannical oppression.

The film, which is still technically a screenplay, has already collected accolades across the global film festival circuit, earning awards in Mexico City, Amsterdam, and Kyiv. Clearly, the faerie tale as an allegorical mechanism resonates. In a cultural moment defined by both a mental health crisis and authoritarian control, the timing of “The Faerie Rings” feels divine; prescient, even. 

We caught up with Brown to discuss the divine timing of his screenplay, writing things into existence, how his psychedelic experiences inspired the film, and what it will take to bring this story from the page to the big screen.

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity

DoubleBlind: When you were writing the screenplay, did you have a sense that it would land with this kind of relevance? Or is that something that only becomes clear once the work is out in the world?

Zina Brown: There’s a certain amount of divine timing with that. You know, because, from my perspective, first and foremost, it's my job to tell an entertaining story like that. If I fail at that, my message will not come through, and nothing else matters. At the same time, it was always my intention to have this story be a faerie tale and a mirror of what's happening in the world right now, and not just from a War on Drugs standpoint, either. It's got a lot of other themes going on, too, including the mental health struggle, especially among the youth, and how psychedelic medicine can help with that. It touches on environmental destruction and climate change, too. It’s set in a slightly dystopian version of America, kind of in the future a little bit, so when I was writing all these things… it was like, already happening everywhere.

DB: Let’s rewind a bit. What first compelled you to bring this screenplay to life?

ZB: There’s one aspect that I think is important to point out, and that’s that [this story] is a faerie tale. I did a lot of research and noticed there’s a lot of overlap between the psychedelic experience and traditional, especially Celtic, fairy lore, like time being stretched and going to another world. You’re encountering otherworldly beings, and those beings aren’t always nice, but they usually have some kind of lesson to teach you. So I thought, this would make a really good parallel to what’s going on right now.

And just to come back to my own personal connection, especially with mushrooms and eventually ayahuasca as well, they’ve helped me become the best version of myself in so many ways. They’ve also helped me tell this story along the way. The experiences I’ve had have literally given me ideas for the story, so there’s so much of that inspiration woven into it, along with the lessons I’ve learned and seen others learn.

The hero of the story, Simon, is a young man dealing with a lot of mental health issues, and I’ve seen that firsthand in the community here in New York City, in all the circles I’ve sat in. The amount of healing and processing — and the ability of these medicines to ease suffering — is unlike anything else, especially given how quickly they can work. And that’s what we need right now. We’re in the fucking frying pan, so we need help, and we need it fast.

DB: You’re drawing a direct line between psychedelic states and folklore. At what point did those experiences begin actively shaping the story?

ZB: After a certain point, when you’ve worked with these medicines long enough, you really begin to feel like you have a relationship with them. However you want to describe it, whether you believe they have their own consciousness — which I absolutely do — being in that space and having a kind of conversation with them can be incredibly enlightening, whether it’s about a creative project or something else going on in your life.

There were times when I’d come to the medicines feeling stuck on a part of the story and needing guidance, and a lot of the time it would come through like a lightning bolt, as if saying, this is what you need to do. And that would become part of the script.

DB: It almost sounds like a collaboration.

ZB: You know, it’s funny, I already have this plan. They’re going to be credited in big letters at the end of the movie. They’ve given me too many gifts for me not to acknowledge them!

DB: I love that! One thing that stood out is your use of faeries — not in the Disney sense, but something more traditional. Can you talk about that?

ZB: I don’t want to spoil the story too much by getting into exactly what the “bites” are, but I will say it was really important for me to show both sides of these faeries. The cannabis faeries and the ayahuasca faerie are some of the main characters our hero encounters, and I wanted to make it clear that these are not Disney experiences. These things have claws and teeth for a reason, and that’s a real part of the psychedelic experience. I wasn’t going to sugarcoat that.

It’s an opportunity for our hero to face things he doesn’t want to face, and some of that can be scary as fuck, especially with something like ayahuasca. You have to be ready to confront those fears, to face something that might look terrifying. But the only reason they’re like that is because they want you to go deeper. They want you to question why. They want you to question yourself, your fears—what is it inside you that’s trying to come out, that can help you find the courage to deal with what you’re seeing?

That also lines up with how faeries show up in traditional stories. Sometimes they offer gifts, and other times they offer something you take a bite of, and suddenly you walk out of the faerie ring, and it’s 110 years later. You have to be careful. They’re tricky.

DB: Would you say they function as trickster figures?

ZB: Yes, absolutely. And they’re also nature spirits, just like the medicines. That’s why, in my film, the characters are faeries, but they’re also the plant spirits themselves. They’re essentially one and the same.

DB: How did the writing process actually unfold for you?

ZB: The initial seeds of the feature really came about during the pandemic, when I had more time on my hands than I expected. I had just come off a short film I did called Dreams of the Last Butterflies, which was really well received and won awards all over the place. That film also had an environmental message — it was about endangered butterflies around the world — and it was kind of a family fairy tale. It did really well, and it helped me realize what was actually important to me. I started asking myself, with my gifts and the experiences I’ve had in this life, what can I bring to the world that would be most helpful right now? And of course, I came back to the psychedelic medicines.

So it started in that moment, developing the story and noticing all these little synchronicities around fairy tales. From there, a lot of the process was about following those synchronicities, because that’s something psychedelics really make apparent. When you’re on the right path, you start noticing strange alignments, like, okay, I think I should do this. I wasn’t even planning to send it to festivals until my producer read it and said, "This is really good, you should be sending this out.” So I started, and it turned into almost a two-year process of submitting it to film festivals around the world. The response was absolutely mind-blowing. Now it’s about using that momentum as leverage and inspiration to get more people excited about it, because clearly, people all over the world are connecting with this story. That’s been a huge help.

DB: You’re now in the phase of trying to bring this to life as a film. What does that actually require at this stage?

ZB: We basically have everything we need except the money—an award-winning screenplay, a producer coming off Stranger Things—we just need investors. That’s where we’re at right now.

DB: You mentioned earlier that this story tackles the drug war head-on. Why was that so important for you to foreground?

ZB: I mean, it really comes down to basic logic. The idea of throwing someone in jail for picking a mushroom or ingesting or smoking a plant that grows naturally is the height of insanity, right? And the worst part is, the reason they won’t let you do that — and will punish you for it — is because these experiences, at their core, help people question authority. And that’s very scary to those in charge. Anything that threatens their control, they’ll demonize and try to destroy. That’s where we are right now in America, and that’s why this is so important. We have to allow people to have cognitive liberty. If we don’t have the freedom to do what we want with our own minds, then what freedom do we really have? None.

There’s also this massive hypocrisy when you consider how many things that are objectively worse for you are readily available at any gas station in America! Being able to hold up a mirror to that is important. And what I love about doing that through a narrative film, rather than a documentary, is that while there are so many great documentaries presenting the facts, a story can bypass the intellect and go straight to the heart. It can hit people on an emotional level or at the very least, it can spark curiosity.

DB: What would you want people to understand about “The Faerie Rings” right now?

ZB: I would say, if people want to see this story made — and want to see these kinds of changes happen — this is the kind of story that could reach millions of people. A real film, one that truly resonates, can have that kind of impact. But, in order to do that, we need help to make it. We need people who not only resonate with the message, but also understand that this is a real investment, we’re going to make our money back, and hopefully it becomes a very successful film. So we really need support to bring this to life. That’s the most important thing I can say. We have everything we need—we just need the people. And of course, people can check out the website to see all the concept art we’ve created, which is really exciting.

There’s a new theory spreading about DMT and the Universe in the underground. Some people now believe that smoking DMT and staring into a diffracted red laser can reveal a hidden “source code” beneath reality itself. But is it true, or are they just…tripping?!

Drawing on firsthand reporting, neuroscientific perspectives, and interviews with both believers and skeptics, journalist Mattha Busby pens a story tracing how expectation, perception, and psychedelic states collide, sometimes producing visions of intricate, hyper-real glyphs, and other times… nothing at all. Is this evidence of a deeper layer of reality, or a compelling illusion shaped by the mind?

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