John Waters

Ten years earlier, it would have been absurd for a gleefully trashy provocateur like Waters to appear on a show as tasteful and buttoned-up as Charlie Rose.

Sure, it’s a bit obvious when Misty sells t-shirts of her mom outside the courthouse, but Natural Born Killers was obvious too - and Serial Mom is a hell of a lot more fun. Everything tacky and tawdry about our serial killer obsession comes out over the course of Beverly’s murder trial, from the assertion that she would be “a new face in the deck of serial killer trading cards” to the fact that Suzanne Somers is set to play her in a made-for-TV movie. But there was an appetite for black comedy at the time - five years earlier, a film as nasty and corrosive as The War of the Roses grossed $160 million - and the 90s would prove to be obsessed with the dark side of suburbia. (It was on the set of Serial Mom where Turner first experienced symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, an ailment that would derail her career for almost a decade.) When she torments poor Dottie Hinkle (Mink Stole) with obscene phone calls for the mortal sin of stealing her parking space, her giddiness is as infectious as it is mean-spirited. And while that steely look in Beverly’s eyes when she’s about to kill someone is undeniably chilling, Turner plays her with over-the-top gusto. [Matthew Lillard](https://collider.com/tag/matthew-lillard/)) that they don’t use “the brown word” in their household, and she gazes longingly out a window imitating bird calls in front of two very confused police officers. Serial Mom debuted outside the box office top ten in its first week, and it only made about $8 million back from its $13 million budget. It was a tar-black comedy about a suburban housewife named Beverly Sutphin who happened to be a demented serial killer, and it was filled with Waters’ favorite things: Baltimore, suburban depravity, sexual perversion, American sensationalism, and heaping dollops of camp. Waters, a man who seems like he could have a lively conversation with just about anybody, was noticeably more reserved compared to some of his other interviews; suspiciously eyeing and nervously laughing along with Rose, one gets the feeling that he knew he was dealing with someone who willfully misunderstood him. Even in 1994, after the success of Hairspray brought Waters closer to the mainstream, he would have fit in more comfortably on Jerry Springer. At the same time, however, his reputation preceded him: he was still infamous for directing filthy, low-budget shock-o-ramas like Multiple Maniacs and Pink Flamingos, and his subversive sensibility was always present even at his most accessible.