In late 1970, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s druggy, mystical western “El Topo” opened at the Elgin Theater in New York with no more fanfare than a small notice in The Village Voice. The film was to be screened only at midnight, according to the ad, because it was “too heavy to be shown any other way.”

A new outré cinema was born: The violent “El Topo” established the template for subsequent midnight blockbusters, like John Waters’s shockingly crude “Pink Flamingos” (1972) and David Lynch’s fantastically weird “Eraserhead” (1977). Had the Japanese animator Eiichi Yamamoto’s psychedelic, sexually explicit “Belladonna of Sadness” (1973) opened at midnight, it, too, might have entered the cult pantheon.

As it was, Mr. Yamamoto’s film was a commercial failure in Japan and, despite a screening at the 1973 Berlin International Film Festival, took more than 40 years to arrive in the United States; last spring, newly restored, it enjoyed brief theatrical runs in New York and Los Angeles and is now out on Blu-ray from Cineliciouspics. It’s also available for streaming from Amazon Video.

A product of countercultural magical thinking, “Belladonna” was inspired by “La Sorcière,” the 19th-century French historian Jules Michelet’s examination of the medieval witch mania as a rebellion, led mainly by women, against the feudal order and the Catholic Church. The movie is also something of a revolt — against constraints of good taste as well as conventional animation.