In 1989, the iconic Beat writer William S. Burroughs produced The Junky’s Christmas, a short story which originally appeared in the collection Interzone.

Four years later, the story appeared on the 1993 album Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales and, following that success, it was later adapted into short claymation film. Given Burroughs’ friendship with Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, he performed a spoken word version of the story as a duet and an alternative cult status was confirmed.

The film adaptation, which was co-directed by Nick Donkin and Melodie McDaniel, involved a collaboration with the great Francis Ford Coppola who oversaw the project as a producer.

According to the film’s official synopsis, the picture tells the story of “a teen girl in 1970’s Berlin becomes addicted to heroin. Everything in her life slowly begins to distort and disappear as she befriends a small crew of junkies and falls in love with a drug-abusing male prostitute”—so not exactly your classic festive tale.

The film would eventually be was released by Koch Vision on DVD in 2006 and, as an additional bonus, featured audio of Burroughs’ reading of the story which was originally recorded for Spare Ass Annie. That recording, incidentally, acted as a new narration of the film.

See the film, below.