“Is this the cocksucker residence? Isn’t this 4251 Pussy Way?” Murderous suburbanite mother Beverly Sutphin (Kathleen Turner) grunts through these scandalizing inquiries during a targeted prank call to a despised neighbor in Serial Mom (1994), one of writer-director John Waters’ classic crime comedies.

Many film lovers know Waters for creating Hairspray (1988) and the high-drama rockabilly world of Cry-Baby (1990). Who can deny Hatchet-Face’s (Kim McGuire) curled fire-engine red lip or Tracy Turnblad’s (Ricki Lake) “motion of the ocean”? Beyond these popular titles, the Baltimorean’s six-decade-long filmography depicts unabashed filth-filled stories that are subversively honest, rich in social critique and curious about people in all their deviant, horny and vengeful wiles.

When Beverly’s film-nerd son, played by the internet’s retrospective ’90s boyfriend, Matthew Lillard, is ridiculed by a teacher for his preoccupation with gore horror, Beverly runs that teacher over with her car. At a flea market, she impales a teenage boy with a fireplace poker for standing her daughter up. She even clubs an elderly pervert to death with a lamb leg. It’s a prolific, lethal streak that her doting husband (Sam Waterston, eyebrow-wriggler extraordinaire) chalks up to menopause.

Though the audience knows that Beverly is the murderous culprit that the evening news monikers “serial mom” (cue the Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood pointer finger), it takes time for her family to catch on. When they do, they aren’t repulsed. Rather, they lavish in their newfound celebrity, devising plans to cast Suzanne Somers in a film about Beverly’s life.

The biting premise allows Waters to poke gaping holes into fantasies of suburban sanctity and female fragility while critiquing what Sally Jane calls “the American obsession with crime and sensationalized murder.” Cookie concurs, writing: “A slasher becomes a courtroom drama in a film that makes fun of suburban nuclear family status quos [and] deconstructs the violence inherent to upholding certain values. So many excellently written cruel women, we feast.”

Running from May 10 through 18, Toronto’s Paradise Theatre will program the delectable Flurry of Filth, a retrospective of eleven films written and directed by Waters. The eight-day celebration opens with an evening of drag performances and a screening of Waters’ X-rated crime comedy Pink Flamingos (1972), one of five Waters films starring Divine, the Drag Queen of the Twentieth Century. The series’ penultimate screening of Pecker (1998) will be accompanied by Waters’ live commentary.

Earlier this spring, I drew on a pencil-thin mustache and connected with Waters to talk about moviemaking. But first, the Pope of Trash had a word on the retrospective: “The Flurry of Filth, that has a good ring to it. I didn’t think it up. Whoever thought it up, I love alliteration.”

“If you have never seen any of my movies and you come to [Pink Flamingos], that’s a litmus test,” Waters says. “You’re either gonna come to see all the rest of them or run from the theater and never go back. I’ve met people that their first date was Pink Flamingos and they got married. I’ve also met other people [whose] first date was Pink Flamingos and it was like Robert De Niro bringing Cybill Shepherd to the porn movie in Taxi Driver.”

Waters started his career with a constellation of these “cruel women” features like Multiple Maniacs (1970) and Female Trouble (1974), movies he made alongside The Dreamlanders, the largely Baltimore-bred repeat cast and crew of his pictures (Divine, Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole, Cookie Mueller, David Lachary, Patty Hearst, Ricki Lake, etc.) In a modern film landscape where overtly sexual, whip-smart, outlaw (white) femme films like Misery, Thelma & Louise and Gone Girl have achieved cult status, the groundwork laid by Waters and the Dreamlanders’ underground cinema cannot be disregarded.

“Drag queens are mainstream now,” the filmmaker remarks. “Drag queen Divine did make all drag queens hipper, I think. When I was young, drag queens were kind of square. They wanted to be Miss America and stuff. Now all drag queens have an edge, a good one.”

Throughout his twenty crass, horny and violent feature-length cinematic projects, Waters shocks but largely to reify that people—including women—exist beyond couth corners. For the more blood-averse film lovers looking for Waters’ tamer narratives, look no further than the Hampden, Baltimore-set sudden-fame satire, Pecker: a film whose subversive filth stems not from serial murder but from the elitism of the New York art world.

“Pecker is kind of my nice film—even though it has in it, you know, tea-bagging and singing Virgin Mary statues and all sorts of stuff,” Waters summarizes. There’s also anti-pubic hair campaigns, characters risking felony charges to have public sex in a voting booth and rats humping in an alley trash can.

The filmmaker recalls, “We had to have a rat handler there, and I thought, ‘What do we show them? Rat porn? How do we get them going? You know, do we show Willard and Ben and different rat movies?’ But eventually, [prop master] Brook Yeaton just pulled them on top of each other and shook them from underneath.” (While we’re on the subject of rodents, Waters offers a passionate recommendation: “The best rat movie ever is Of Unknown Origin. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. It’s about a guy that buys a house in Brooklyn to rehab it and there’s a rat in there that declares war against it and he loses that war.” Watchlists, go!)

Although acclaim and attention within the photography scene may seem coveted, they spoil Pecker’s ties to his family and friends, who become scrutinized photo subjects through his abrupt stardom. His older sister Tina (Martha Plimpton) gets fired from the gay bar where she works, as photos of men tea-bagging bar-goers attract swarms of straight people. Pecker’s eccentric Memama (Jean Schertler) loses her ability to talk directly to the Virgin Mary, saying poignantly to her grandson, “Your photos ruined my miracle.” His photo assistant, best friend and town thief, Matt (’90s indie darling Brendan Sexton III), gains unwanted police attention when photos of him stealing gain popularity.

Ultimately, Pecker flips the script on the New York art scene, turning down a solo show at the Whitney and inviting everyone to his Baltimore show where the elite become the new subjects on the wall. It’s a twist that amplifies the deviance, not of murderous wenches but of creative playmakers and artistic voyeurs.

Expanding on his interest in contrasting a blue-collar Baltimore DIYer against the Manhattanite art life, Waters shares, “I’m in the art world some. I like the complexity of the art world. The elitism of the art world, I’m all for. I think it’s hilarious because you have to learn a special language, you have to learn how to dress a special way. It’s magic. I like the art world and I participate in it. So it was the first movie I made that kind of satirized that. All my movies satirized some kind of genre or some kind of world that I liked. That’s why I think I’ve been able to get away with those things. I make fun of things I like, not hate.”

Pecker is this subtle celebration of enjoying art-making for art-making’s sake in the place you are from alongside the people you love. Robyn praises, “Pecker is the most loving tribute to Baltimore [that] Waters has created so far. It is a pure, loving piece of art.” The film also lives as a time capsule. According to Waters, the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore where the film was shot and set has changed drastically.

“All the locations where we filmed that movie are gone. There’s not one place left,” he says. “Even Pecker’s house burned down. So there’s no place left. Pecker’s place, the bar, is now an H&R Block. It’s strange. It’s a different neighborhood.”

Take Cecil B. Demented (2000), which follows a cult of auteur-obsessed theater workers and filmmakers who kidnap A-list movie star Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith) and force her to star in their guerilla indie film. When the eponymous director (Stephen Dorff) and his comrades crash a Baltimore film event, they hold a studio vice president at gunpoint for making another movie based on a video game. The exec bargains with the band of gun-slinging artists, pleading, “It wasn’t my idea. I don’t even go to the movies!” It’s a prototypical splash of irony that Waters often weaves into his dialogue, as if to say, “Talking buttholes this, humping rats that, you know what’s really gross? Not giving a damn about people or art.”

Granted, Waters has long focused his art on the types of characters that often go unseen in films. In Serial Mom, Beverly is friends with Gus (Bus Howard) and Sloppy (Alan J. Wendl), the sanitation workers who take her weekly garbage and recycling, and ultimately attend her murder trial in solidarity. Pecker’s mother Joyce runs a thrift shop where she helps style Miss Betty (Carolyn Stayer) and Outside Al (Jack Webster), two houseless characters who frequent the store. She even invites a group of houseless people to Pecker’s New York gallery celebration for free food, but when they arrive, art critics promptly throw them out.

Detailing the motivation behind Pecker’s houseless characters, Waters says, “Commes des Garçons [founder Rei Kawakubo] is one of my favorite designers, and her clothes—you have to spend a lot of money to look like you’re homeless. Her clothes purposely had holes in them. I bought a jacket, a white summer jacket, but it has grease stains all over it, like somebody at Jiffy Lube attacked you. I wore it and I was on stage, but I went in the 7-Eleven to get something on the way to the show. This homeless man said to me, ‘Did you put that on there?’ I said, ‘No, it came like this.’ He said, ‘I got one just like it.’ It was great, and that’s what it was.”

Although these character inclusion choices may seem miniscule, they are not. As people strain to embody the proverbial energy and survival chances of a main character, it is refreshing to see films focus on people who are often otherwise relegated to the background, from local artists who bus the tables at hamburger shops to sanitation workers who sweep the city streets that main characters often destroy before saving.

Drag artists, film-store clerks, neighborhood thieves, butch strippers, laundromat workers, houseless people, murderous drag queens, seamstresses, punks, porn stars—all find a home within the Pope of Trash’s watery world. His crass concepts, foul-mouthed characters and social commentary aren’t cheap tricks to shock the masses. Refreshingly, they push back on the premise of excessive censorship and deceitful social contracts, implicitly asking: what is the purpose of presenting a polished, sexless, safe world on screen if that is not the world that the audience spends their waking hours within?

Waters had the following message to share with retrospective attendees and Dreamland lovers who, like him, reject the sanitized world in favor of his Flurry of Filth:

“Thank you for letting me get away with this. Thank you for making me. I’ve never had to get a real job because of you. And I’m not the filthiest person alive. You are!”