How horror inspired the weird and wonderful world of John Waters: “I find humour in all the things that are terrible”
Once you enter John Waters’ cinematic world, you’ll either never want to return or you’ll be gagging for more. Since he started making films in the 1960s, the director has garnered significant controversy due to his love of all things shocking and vile. Yet, the sheer ridiculousness of his work, which is gloriously self-aware and steeped in humour, makes it so great. That’s not to say that Waters simply makes stupid films with all shock and no substance – there’s method to his madness.
“I find humour in all the things that are terrible about America and things that people have anxiety about, but the first step of getting rid of anxiety is to laugh at it,” he once told David Letterman. By placing unconventional figures and those who are considered outliers to society at the centre of his films alongside taboo themes, he presents audiences with the polar opposite of what is considered ‘normal.’ His work challenges the status quo, and for many viewers, Waters’ unashamedly camp and flamboyant movies have been a real source of inspiration.
The film that cemented his status as a cinematic provocateur was Pink Flamingos, released in 1972, which featured everything from implied incest, rape, castration and murder to the genuine consumption of dog shit. The movie has an overarchingly dirty feeling – you practically want to scrub yourself clean after watching it. There are certainly horror elements to the movie – the same goes for other titles by Waters, like Multiple Maniacs and Desperate Living – but they’re not exactly horror films.
Within all of Waters’ films, where grotesque actions are part and parcel, the true horrors lie in the lack of morals that his characters possess, who willingly kill, abuse and torture each other, often in the name of beauty or art (as explored in Female Trouble). While Serial Mom can be considered an actual horror due to its slasher set-up, the best term to describe Waters’ work, which is often gory and graphic, is an ‘avant-garde nightmare’.
It’s not a surprise, then, that the horror genre has significantly inspired Waters, more specifically, the kinds of schlocky, exploitative B-movies that were never popular in the mainstream but totally transformed horror. When asked if he is influenced by horror, he once said, “Yes, but bad horror. Not the Hammer movies. Stuff like William Castle or Herschell Gordon Lewis.”
Lewis is credited for bringing gore to the big screen through his splatter films. His movies were relentlessly gory and boundary-pushing, digging deep into the recesses of human nature and pulling out all things stomach-curdling and abject, confronting us with our mortality and the harsh reality of the human propensity for violence and torture.
The filmmaker was even dubbed the Godfather of Gore, with his best-known works including Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs, The Gore Gore Girls, and The Wizard of Gore. Evidently, Lewis had a penchant for the grotesque. Waters’ films might not shed as much blood as Lewis’, but films like Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble certainly pay homage to the filmmaker with certain visceral scenes. While discussing Lewis, Waters said, “I interviewed him for my book Shock Value, which I wrote in 1980. I think I sort of started that whole Herschell revival.”
Castle, on the other hand, was a B-movie master known for his horror movie gimmicks, which Waters would create for himself, too. One of Waters’ favourite movies of his is The Tingler, which encourages audience participation. In one scene, a character demands the audience to scream, but back when it was shown in theatres, some of the chairs were fitted with vibrating devices for added effect. For his film Macabre, he employed nurses and hearses to wait outside of screenings, frightening people before the movie had even started. When Waters made his 1981 film Polyester, scratch-and-sniff cards were placed in seats so that audiences could smell along with the movie, clearly inspired by Castle.
Of course, Lewis and Castle just scrape the surface of Waters’ horror interests with some of Waters’ other favourite horror movies, including The Corpse Grinders, The Bad Seed, Final Destination 3, In A Glass Cage, and Bloodsucking Freaks. It is evident that his love of all things horrific has been vital to shaping his approach to filmmaking, with nothing out of bounds for the ambitious Pope of Trash.
