Sex, Gore and Provocation: the Influence of Exploitation in John Waters’s Early Films

A self-taught filmmaker working with very low budgets, fascinated with Hollywood’s glamor as well as exploitation and underground cinema, John Waters has appropriated techniques and modes of production, distribution and promotion specific to exploitation from the beginning of his career in the late 1960s. The illicit, controversial topics addressed in his early movies, traditionally brought up by exploitation in order to attract audiences whose voyeuristic desires would not be fulfilled by Hollywood’s promotion of moral standards, have predictably put him at the margins of mainstream movie culture. Many exploitation filmmakers have had a strong impact on the filmmaker’s aesthetics and politics—among them, American filmmaker Russ Meyer, a master of sexploitation, whose strong female characters inspired the creation of Waters’s lead female heroines embodied by American drag queen Divine. A pioneer of the gore subgenre, Herschell Gordon Lewis and his exploitation of graphic violence and blood in order to take the horror genre one step further has influenced the gruesome aesthetics of Waters’s films. Likewise, Waters’s emulations of the mondo films, pseudo-documentaries depicting sensational topics and supposedly real barbaric human behaviors all around the world, have also contributed to gross out his audiences. This article will focus on the filmmaker’s choice to borrow specific codes and motifs of exploitation cinema, leading to the elaboration of a hybrid, trash cinema humorously proposing an alternative vision of the world, giving visibility to social outcasts, questioning society’s norms and debunking gender roles. His first feature-length movies, Mondo Trasho (1969), Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974), which account for the influence of exploitation on the filmmaker’s career, can be described as exploitation cinema themselves to a certain extent and assert the emergence of Waters as the “Pope of Trash.”