Some filmgoers find the early filmography of John Waters demented, repulsive, and nauseating. You need only to watch an excerpt from Waters’ 1974 film Female Trouble to understand that reaction. In practically every moment of the film, Waters and his cast craft a vile audience experience, including (among other horrors) the unpleasant severing of an umbilical cord.

Of course, shock value was nothing new to cinema when Waters began making films. The disruptive force of disgust had been recognised since the surrealist movement, when Buñuel and Dalí infamously sliced open an eye in their 1929 film Un Chien Andalou. Shock value is also neither a remnant of filmmaking past; the tradition is alive and well today, especially in Hollywood, which has been churning out ‘gross-out’ films such as American Pie and The Hangover for more than a decade.

But despite appearing to be an evolutionary step in cinematic history from surrealism to ‘gross-out’ film, Female Trouble and other trash films separate themselves from other shocking pieces of cinema in one way: their utter tastelessness. When Buñuel and Dalí filmed Un Chien Andalou, they wanted to provoke a conversation to think about film and art. When Stifler slips a laxative into Finch’s cappuccino in American Pie, the Weitz brothers are trying to draw a few laughs. Generally, in ‘gross-out’ films, disgusting things happen to nice characters. In trash films, disgusting things happen to disgusting characters. The tastelessness is the point.

That aesthetic of tastelessness didn’t come out of nowhere. Waters’ films owe a large debt to the work of both Jack Smith and the Kuchar brothers. Smith, perhaps better known as the father of American performance art, made the 1963 underground film Flaming Creatures. The film, which was seized by New York City police at its premiere due to its sexually explicit imagery, questions sexual identity and helped introduce the notion of ‘queer’ into the mainstream. Brothers Mike and George Kuchar crafted melodramatic and sometimes disgusting films as part of the New York City underground film scene, including the 1976 film A Reason To Live, which features human excrement in one troubling scene. Waters has acknowledged the influence of all three filmmakers.

What is so often easily overlooked about trash films such as Female Trouble is that there is sometimes seriousness hiding behind the jokes and bad taste. Once that layer is peeled back, Female Trouble reveals itself as a sustained critique of Hollywood films. When the protagonist Dawn Davenport (Divine) shoots into the crowd during her piece of performance art, the film implicitly questions what it means to display violence and whether or not Hollywood’s depiction of violence in films constitutes an attack on the audience. So while it’s an understandable temptation to think of Female Trouble and other trash films as just tasteless fun, you should remember that they can be serious, carefully crafted films…and tasteless fun.