The twisted horror character John Waters wanted to be when he was younger: “I was the bad seed”
It takes guts to become the kind of filmmaker that John Waters is known as – his work typically described with words like transgressive, shocking, bad taste, grotesque, and vile. However, it doesn’t seem like Waters has had to muster up much strength to make this kind of art. It’s built-in, a natural impulse that seems to have always been there, uncompromisable.
Waters’ journey to becoming one of the most equally controversial and beloved filmmakers started in the 1960s when he was a long-haired, acid-taking perpetual stoner with a desire to scare the hippies advocating for peace and love. He wanted to cause chaos and truly challenge the status quo through his confronting artistic approach. He gathered local friends to appear in his movies, like Harris Glenn Milstead, who would often transform himself into a drag queen using the name Divine – one given to him by Waters himself from the Jean Genet book Our Lady of the Flowers.
Shooting on a minuscule budget in the streets of Baltimore, Waters’ work quickly shocked those who had a chance to view it, with early shorts such as Roman Candles and Eat Your Makeup showcasing drag, murder, kidnapping, and other taboo themes. During the 1970s, Waters began making movies that would later become cult classics, like Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, pushing the viewer’s propensity for violence, graphic sex, and various stomach-turning images.
Even when Waters was offered the chance to work with big budgets, more established actors, and specialised crew members who could film and edit his movies for him, Waters still harnessed a distinctive style that revelled in all things camp and contentious. Take, for example, his latest film to date, A Dirty Shame, which follows a group of sex addicts. It is full of explicit scenes, with the director harking back to his earlier work – only this time, he had actors like Selma Blair and Tracey Ullman involved.
Waters has always had a penchant for the weirdest and darkest slices of humanity. It seems he’s been that way as a kid, calling himself a “bad seed.” It’s unsurprising, then, that it’s the evil protagonist from the 1956 film The Bad Seed who Waters wanted to be when he was a child, too.
The movie was released when Waters was ten, just two years older than the murderous Rhoda in the classic horror movie directed by Mervyn LeRoy. Talking to a crowd at the Nashville Independent Film Festival, Waters once explained, “The first person I ever wanted to be was Patty McCormack, who played Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed. He added, “She was this nasty little girl that murdered people. I just pretended I was her without telling anyone else what I was doing. I was the bad seed.”
The film was praised by critics, earning both McCormack and Eileen Heckart Oscar nominations for ‘Best Supporting Actress’. In addition, Nancy Kelly was nominated for ‘Best Actress’ and Harold Rosson was nominated for ‘Best Cinematography’. It’s now considered a cult classic, and a movie that Waters still holds dearly.
In his book Role Models, Waters talks about meeting McCormack and muses upon the movie and its characters, writing fantastic lines such as “Today, would the character Rhoda be put on Ritalin? When she reached puberty, would she have turned into a trench-coat-wearing school massacre type?”
