Trash! The Wildest Films You’ve Ever Seen season announced for BFI Southbank

This April BFI Southbank presents Trash! The Wildest Films You’ve Ever Seen (30 March to 30 April), a season celebrating those filmmakers and movies that revel in trash cinema’s low budget, underground weirdness on the big screen in all their trashy glory. 

Here, trash is a label to be worn with pride rather than to be taken as an insult, with season highlights including an intimate evening with cult film icon Mink Stole (Pink Flamingos, Desperate Living, Hairspray) presenting a new show with San Francisco drag impresario and filmmaker Peaches Christ, as well as the world premiere of a new 35mm print of Plan 9 from Outer Space, Ed Wood’s cult sci-fi horror honourably badged as ‘the worst film of all time’. This new print has been created specifically for this season from original elements preserved in the BFI National Archive. 

Curated by BFI National Archive curator William Fowler and BFI Head of Cinema Programme Justin Johnson, the season includes some of American trash cinema’s most (in)famous names, ranging from the 1930s to the 1990s including films by John Waters (Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos), George and Mike Kuchar (Sins of the Fleshapoids, Hold Me While I’m Naked), Jack Smith (Normal Love), Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast), Russ Meyer (Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!), Paul Morrissey (Trash), Curt McDowell (Thundercrack!), Beth B (Salvation!) and Bruce LaBruce (Super 8 ½) among others. 

The American tradition of trash films delights in its low budget and so-called ‘bad taste’ aesthetic. They are lurid, camp, transgressive, wild and DIY, made by friends and lovers who subvert received ideas about gender, sex and identity. Often received as barbed, playful, nihilistic retorts to the socially and politically rigid, trash cinema gleefully serves up the very opposite of respectable mainstream film with their sensationalist, taboo-busting narratives, shoestring budgets and featuring outsiders, misfits and flamboyant creatures, both behind and in front of the camera. 

Their history goes back to the carny sideshows of yore, breaking the fourth wall and revelling in audience’s complicit inclusion in both the shocks and jokes. Shown at cheap drive-ins, alternative art spaces and midnight movie palaces, these queer, divine, eye-popping works challenge the limits of censorship while blurring the boundaries between art and exploitation, parody and homage, excess and play.

Trash! The Wildest Films You’ve Ever Seen builds on the legacy of BFI Southbank’s highly successful John Waters, Scala and Moviedrome seasons. While some films in the season have entered the language of mainstream cinema and even influenced popular culture, bringing this curated programme to the big screen allows audiences to reclaim trash’s subversive delights for the cinema – where they find their best, most exciting articulation, invoking both their original shock value and artistic merit with a mix of archive and new prints and digital restorations, plus a selection of titles available UK-wide online via BFI Player. 

The season introduction Some Films Are Trash, Some Have Trash-Ness Thrust Upon Them (1 April) will dissect the specific qualities that trash films have in common and explain why trash deserves to be embraced. Season curators Will Fowler and Justin Johnson will be joined by Helen de Witt, Elena Gorfinkel and Dominic Johnson to discuss where trash begins and ends. 

The centrepieces of our Trash! season are Idol Worship – An evening with Mink Stole & Peaches Christ (10 April), a revelatory and heartfelt cabaret show starring living legend Mink Stole and drag impresario and filmmaker Peaches Christ. Close friends for over two decades, Mink Stole and Peaches Christ come together for an evening of storytelling, film clips and live song, in a wildly entertaining and uncensored exposé that is as hilarious as it is revealing. Definitely the event for fans of John Waters’s films, Divine, drag history and trash cinema in all its shocking glory. Meet and Greet tickets will also be available.

Our other centrepiece screening is the world premiere of a brand new 35mm print of Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), Ed Wood’s crowning achievement, made from original elements preserved by the BFI National Archive. A bonafide cult classic, Plan 9 from Outer Space, dubbed ‘the worst film of all time’, long circulated on poor quality video and DVD. Now audiences can experience the film as it was meant to be seen on the big screen, resurrecting goth icons Bela Lugosi and Vampira in big, bold monochrome 35mm. BFI National Archive curatorial and preservation staff, and acclaimed writer, radio broadcaster, Royal College of Art lecturer and long-term Ed Wood devotee Ken Hollings will introduce and contextualise Wood’s magnum opus. 

Tim Burton’s loving homage Ed Wood (1994) is the perfect companion piece to the season and Plan 9’s special screening. Burton’s film celebrates Wood the dreamer’s, drive and determination (impeccably performed by Johnny Depp) as he moves from one poorly received film production to another and features an Oscar-winning turn by Martin Landau as veteran horror icon Bela Lugosi.

Tickets for BFI Southbank screenings are on sale to BFI Patrons on 9 March, BFI Members on 10 March, and to the general public on 12 March.