Steve Ellison is still freaked out by earthquakes. The man who'd grow up to be the boundary-pushing electronic musician Flying Lotus and cult-adored rapper Captain Murphy was only 10 years old when the cataclysmic Northridge quake of '94 shook his native Los Angeles to its foundations. The apocalyptic-looking wreckage left all over the streets provided Wes Craven with some unbeatable verisimilitude for his Nightmare on Elm Street meta-sequel Wes Craven's New Nightmare, and when it hit theaters later that year, Ellison was glued to his cineplex seat with a queasy sort of terror.

"It was fucking traumatic, man," he says. "Anyone who's been through [that earthquake] has this anxiety, where we always feel that there's something big coming."

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That primal image of rubble-strewn ruin and shattered pavement was ground zero for Kuso, the debut feature film project from the long-time musical luminary. A similar seismic shake-up sets in motion a series of vignettes about the assorted weirdoes sorting through the aftermath, but from there the snatches of story venture into some singularly bizarre no-man's-lands. Because you most likely do not know me personally, describing Kuso as the most disgusting movie I've ever seen doesn't mean much, so consider instead the two most meaningful emotional beats of the film: In one scene, a large talking cockroach emerges from funk legend George Clinton's distended anus to projectile-vomit green slime onto a nearly-nude man. In another, that same fellow mouth-fucks his girlfriend's evil sentient wart to completion. As one does.

But Ellison doesn't want Kuso to go down as the sum of its provocations. He's poured too much of himself into cinema for this to be a mere prank. As a kid, he'd use a camcorder to make crude stop-motion shorts with his action figures when not sitting rapt before the work of Tim Burton. ("I've seen a lot of classical cinema, but Beetlejuice… It just makes me happy, man.") He originally went to school to study the craft of filmmaking, earning his degree from the Los Angeles Film School and doing a brief stint at the Academy of Art before dropping out to pursue a career producing beats for area rappers.

Brainfeeder Films

But movies, especially the more outré genre flotsam around the underground fringes, have always been an influence on his work; his DU∆LITY mixtape under the Captain Murphy moniker sampled audio from the Italo-horror of Mario Bava and Alejandro Jodorowsky's mind-expander El Topo. And from early tinkering—a video-collage project to accompany DU∆LITY, getting involved with TV madhouse Adult Swim—an irrepressible demon seed of an idea was born.

"In 2015, I was using Photoshop a lot to design these characters with all these weird skin problems, meat faces and stuff," Ellison says. "But I wanted to see those people move. So it started blossoming… Knowing Adobe After Effects, I could construct demo scenes just to illustrate the tone. I could design what the kids wear in the school, their hats, the pod monsters, I envisioned all that shit. It has a unified look to it that came from not having a lot of help. There weren't a lot of people who could offer up answers to this."

"I figured out how to do random, weird, dumb shit. I had to figure out how to get Tim Heidecker's head to come out of a toilet."

Even for a first-time feature director, Ellison was unusually on his own. He filled out the cast with friends and past collaborators, and wore as many hats as his cranium could support. "There was producing, directing, writing, puppeteering, sound design, editing, scoring, voiceover work. It was a lot. I fuckin' did visual effects and animation! I figured out how to do random, weird, dumb shit. I had to figure out how to get Tim Heidecker's head to come out of a toilet." But Ellison's most daring investment in his vision was not creative, but monetary; the film's modest budget came right out of his own bank account.

Brainfeeder Films

"I've spent so much time in the past overthinking," he says. "I've written other films. There are other ideas I've tried to get off the ground but never did because I overthought everything, thought about money and how much it would cost. It would always hold me back. But I figured out that I could afford to spend $400,000 of my own money, and if I don't make it back, it won't kill me. I knew I could spend that, having done a lot of other work and keeping that much saved. I mean, it'd suck to lose four hundred grand, but I wouldn't be homeless. Having to invest like that meant there was no plan B, but it also meant I wouldn't have to explain my ideas to people. I wouldn't have to deal with people coming through my set to make sure I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing."

He capitalized on that enviable totality of control to forge one of the strangest films in the medium's history. A hysterical mashup of lo-fi music video aesthetics, Cubist cut-art distortion and deadpan surrealist comedy steeped in an atmosphere of sexual dysfunction and insecurity, it's at once amusing and utterly revolting. Somewhere around the DIY abortion accompanied by Mortal Kombat sound effects, even the most begrudging viewer must recognize the rarity of cinema this resolutely uncompromising. Ellison made it his way, from scripting to his gonzo methods of production.

Brainfeeder Films

"I made most of the film sober!" he laughs. "I shot the majority sober, but I wrote it all while high. I tried to keep it pro when I was on set. Didn't want to miss any details, but once I got comfortable enough to smoke while working, it freed up my camera a little bit. It took me a while to gain any kind of confidence."

"I shot the majority sober, but I wrote it all while high. I tried to keep it pro when I was on set."

Though Ellison succeeded in bringing his deranged fantasyland to life, he quickly found that not everybody would be willing or able to join him there. From the earliest screenings, audience response has been polarizing, and that's putting it politely; there were the expected walkouts when Kuso first opened at Sundance, and the meetings with potential distributors didn't yield the results Ellison was hoping for. As buzzy, crowd-pleasing indie comedies got snatched up for millions, the festival's scabby mutant black sheep went untouched, until horror-specific streaming service Shudder stepped in.

Musician George Clinton and director Steve Ellison attend the Daniel Boczarski Getty Images

"There were offers, but none that were going to help me recoup," Ellison recalls. "Shudder came through, and I was like, 'Oh, yeah? Sweet. We're in. Def. Down.' I haven't done this before, so I don't have anything to compare it to. But still, in this climate, I think it's the best home for the movie. Shudder's library is fucking awesome. It's dope that my movie will be next to, like, Testuo the Iron Man."

While a direct-to-online release may sound like a concession of failure, it may be the wisest move when dealing with a love-it-or-loathe-it proposition like Kuso. Ellison believes that Shudder will help connect this highly idiosyncratic film with the specific type of viewer who will appreciate its unique charms, a profile he outlines as "kids who miss Ren and Stimpy." And while an expression of beatific bliss was plastered on his face when the film played to sold-out Z-movie connoisseurs during a two-night preview in New York, Ellison's also perfectly happy with a humbler legacy: "[The movie] is good to see with other people, even if that just means you and a few friends, eating pizza, and smoking weed."

Like any filmmaker with one feature under his belt, Ellison's ambitions (aside from a new Flying Lotus studio record) now center around the bugaboo of the sophomore follow-up. "I just hope I can make another one" is the most he can ask for when questioned about his plans for the future. But he's already got something in mind: "I'd love to make a Twisted Metal movie. It'd be like The Usual Suspects meets Death Race 2000, full of car crashes. I can see it so clearly in my head."

For now, however, Ellison's focused on doing right by his precious deformed baby. He bristles a bit at the reputation Kuso has begun to take on, intently shrugging off the label of provocateur. In a pair of tweets, he dispelled the murmurs of mass riots at his Sundance showing, and he maintains that he didn't want to make a movie with a "malicious feeling" to it. His heart is true, even if it's pumping the viscous syrup Karo. ("It's, like, fake come," Ellison explains. "You can pick it up at a Wal-Mart or wherever.") The various transgressions of his film come from an earnest place, submitted in the sincere hope that any screams of horror they might yield will have a finishing note of delight. Ellison had decades of pent-up creative energy to share with the world, and it took an 8.0 on the Gross-Out Richter scale to open the fissures in his brain and shake it all loose. "It wasn't my intention to make the grossest film of all time," he shrugs. "I just wanted to have fun. I wanted to take a ride.

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