Over the course of the last thirty-three years, Lloyd Kaufman's Troma Entertainment has produced hundreds of films, attracted legions of devoted fans, and influenced the likes of Peter Jackson, Quentin Tarantino, Trey Parker, Eli Roth and Takashi Miike. In fact, by Kaufman's estimation, the studio now owns more than 800 films and TV shows.

And yet, with the exception of Kaufman's 1985 film The Toxic Avenger (which spawned three sequels, an animated series, a musical adaptation, a comic book, a toy line, a video game and a novel), Troma's uncompromisingly raunchy slapstick horror comedies have rarely found success with mainstream audiences. Kaufman's strict independent ethos and unwillingness to water down his films has put him at odds with many mainstream outlets--including major film festivals, distributors and publications (Director Paul Haggis recently suggested in Entertainment Weekly that the "worst film of all time" was probably a Troma film).

To be sure, Kaufman's films are not for the faint of heart. They're usually full of sex and gore and feces, and to the uninitiated they can seem, well, straight-up bizarre if not outright offensive. But underneath their rough exteriors, Troma films are often smart social satires--occasionally among the most daring and honest of their kind. And despite his bawdy sense of humor, Kaufman himself is a very smart man; a Yale graduate, a rabid film buff, and an outspoken advocate of independent art.

Tonight, Lloyd will personally unveil his newest film, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, at the Alamo Lake Creek. We recently had a chance to chat with him about the politics of slapstick gore, the definition of exploitation cinema, and the price of artistic freedom.

I understand that Poultrygeist was partly inspired by the book Fast Food Nation.

Well, no…that’s not true. It was inspired by the fact that McDonalds moved in next to the Troma building, and we immediately had rats the size of raccoons living in our basement, and I’d have to go down and fight them. And then, as a result of that, I started studying the fast food industry, and realized that it’s a disgrace.

Did you ever work a fast food job as a kid?

No, but the guy with whom I wrote the screenplay—the supervising editor, Gabe Friedman—this movie was his idea. He was a new employee when I was down in the basement fighting the rats. It was his first week on the job, so he was the only one willing to go down there with me to clean up the rat shit. And while we were doing it, he mentioned that he worked at a fast food restaurant—obviously, working at Troma was a step down from that—and he said to me, 'a lot of your movies are kind of political, like Class of Nuke 'Em High, Squeeze Play, Tromeo and Juliet... they’ve all had political and sociological themes. So why not center the next Troma movie around fast food?'

So then I read Fast Food Nation, and I got a tremendous amount of information from it. And then we spent about a year writing [Poultrygeist]. I’d always been a big fan of Broadway musicals, and I’d always wanted to have some singing and dancing in my films, so I figured, 'let’s put it in this one!' I was the first to mix the slapstick and horror genres, so why not mix in some singing and dancing too? Are you familiar with Takashi Miike’s movies?

Oh yes.

He’s a big Troma fan—he actually wrote a big piece in Tokyo about Citizen Toxie explaining why it’s a great work of art. And I’m a big fan of his movies. He made a movie called Happiness of the Katakuris, and it’s a movie that had zombies and things, but it also had songs in it. It had some singing and dancing. It wasn’t a musical—and Poultrygeist is not a musical—but it gave me the courage to do those things in my movie.

So I announced on the internet that we were looking for someone to write music, and we got a response from a guy up in Canada who wrote all the music and the score. Oh yeah, and I also said that he’d have to do it for no money. And that’s the miracle of the internet! He did a really good job. Gabe and I wrote the lyrics, but the guy from Canada wrote the music. And I’d never met him!

You never met him during the whole process?

I just met him. The movie was in a Canadian film festival [Toronto After Dark], so he came to that about three months ago. But not while we were working on the movie.

The internet truly is great.

Thanks to the internet, we also had about 80 people working out of Buffalo New York who came from Australia, France, Germany, California, Canada—and I’m pretty sure we had people from Texas working on the movie as well. We rented an old church in Buffalo, and people came from all over the world to work on Poultrygeist, thanks to the internet.

Is it true that you personally financed this film?

Oh yes. My wife and I paid for it. We had to. I told her that I was investing in Transformers. Troma didn’t have the money, so we put it up.

I suppose that’s the price for being—I mean, Troma is one of the last truly independent film studios.

That’s very true. We’re the oldest, and probably the only one that’s had any kind of longevity that’s really, truly independent. The only reason that we still exist is that we have a big fan base—a cult following. And they’re very supportive of us. They’re the ones who get us into the theatres. For example, at the theatres in Texas, it was the fans who went to them and asked them to play the film.

There’s actually a series here in Austin called Tromatic Thursdays, where they play Troma films every Thursday night. Which is great, because they’re the kind of movies that are best seen with a big group of people on a big screen, I think.

What’s great about Poultrygeist is that it’s a lot of fun to watch with an audience. It was shot on 35mm, like all of our movies, which is something that’s very unusual these days for independent movies. It’s beautiful—it’s beautiful to look at. And the prints are all brand new, so it’s much nicer looking than a lot of films.

Do you ever see yourself moving to digital?

I just think that film is much more beautiful. And our fans love the way our movies look. We’ve produced movies on digital, but our fans seem to like our 35mm movies. They like seeing them in the movie theatre. I dunno…what do you think?

I think 35mm looks great. It just seems like a lot of people are shooting digital these days. For example, David Lynch has said he’ll never go back to shooting on film because of its limitations.

Yes, but he’s got all the money in the world, so he can spend a billion dollars to light it, and then spend the money to transfer it back to film so that he can show it in the movie theatres. Sidney Lumet has also said the same thing—but when you’re making movies with thirty or forty million dollars, you can use all the best technology and then go back to film. But I can’t do that.

Do you follow mainstream horror at all?

Well, it’s pretty bad isn’t it? I mean—I may have invented the slapstick horror, but my movies have some political and sociological satire that go with them. These movies like Scary Movie or Freddy [vs.] Jason… they’re just garbage.

Well, I agree that the best horror movies usually have some kind of social satire or commentary built into them...

Certainly. And Poultrygeist deals with all kinds of themes. There is corporate satire, anti-Muslim satire, animal rights satire—there are a million things going on. The fast food establishment is called ‘American Chicken Bunker’, so there’s a 'fast food and war' theme there. Inside the restaurant, there’s a poster for their main drink, which is called ‘Cluckwork Orange’—you drink it from a little water pistol that they give you, so the poster has a picture of a little boy putting the gun in his mouth. There are lots of these thing scattered around in the background of the movie. It’s very entertaining movie, but it also has a lot to say.

Is the Tromadance Festival going to happen this year?

Yes! What would make you think it wasn’t?

Well, as I understand it, you’re having trouble putting together the money.

Oh, yes. See, Troma itself has never been more famous, but we’re economically blacklisted. The Independent Film Channel has never shown a Troma movie. Never. We’re a thirty-five year-old company, and IFC has never shown Citizen Toxie or The Toxic Avenger or Cannibal The Musical by Trey Parker. Or Dario Argento’s Stendhal Syndrome. Cannibal The Musical has never even been on Comedy Central! We're blacklisted. The Sundance Channel, which is supposed to support and encourage independent films, has never shown any of our movies. So we have no revenue.

Why do you think that is? Would you consider your movies exploitation films?

Well, show me a movie that isn’t an exploitation film! I’ll give you an exploitation film: No Country for Old Men. It’s full of graphic violence. It exploits graphic violence, and it exploits its stars—it has stars in it, like Javier Bardem. It’s an exploitation film. So in that regard, I’d say yes, but in every other regard, I’d say no.

And Poultrygeist, as a piece of art and as a work of originality, surpasses No Country for Old Men in every department. Including acting, including character development, and including script. And the Coen Brothers are great filmmakers!

So that’s my thought about where Poultrygeist lies in the realm of art and exploitation. In a fair world, we’d be getting critical acclaim. But our movie isn’t distributed by Walt Disney, or Miramax.

What is it then that prevents your movies from being distributed in those ways?

Well, we don’t have any money, and we don’t want to have to compromise to get it. We don’t want committees telling us what to do. We want to OWN our movies. We don’t want Disney owning The Toxic Avenger. See, studios own all of the movies. They want to control everything. And they want to have rights that go on forever.

So it’s not so much that it’s not possible to get money, it’s just that then you can’t make the movies you want to make.

Exactly. It’s artistic freedom. And there are very few American directors who’ve been doing this for such a long time. I have a very large body of work, and everybody from Takashi Miike to Peter Jackson to James Gunn to Eli Roth, Quentin Tarantino and Trey Parker have been influenced by me. So that’s pretty cool, and it’s because I have total control over my movies. But the big tradeoff is that we have very low budgets, and we’re blacklisted.

But we have a very loyal following, and they stay with us and support us, and we keep going. But the regulations that used to prevent monopoly have been done away with, and as a result, there are no independent movies on TV these days, unless it comes in through Fox Searchlight or Miramax or someone like that. There used to be rules that prevented these kinds of things, but during Clinton’s administration, the rules hat required major networks to find thirty-five percent of their programming from independent producers were done away with. There used to be a rule that the studios couldn’t own movie theatres… and that rule was done away with during the Reagan administration. Bit by bit, all the protection against monopoly is gone, and that’s why it’s impossible for any independent movie company to stay in business. Or, they have to live off the crumbs that fall off the table of the Hollywood conglomerates.

I’ve actually just been elected chairman of the very prestigious Independent Film and Television Alliance. It’s basically a trade association for the independent film industry. And I’m hoping to use their resources to lobby in Washington to educate the lawmakers and the FCC and the opinion makers, and to be the representative for filmmakers that the MPAA pretends to be. I want to tell them that the independent film industry is not alive and well at the Sundance Film Festival. Because they don’t know that. Independent art is in great danger—and yet, where do most of our biggest stars come from?

Well, a lot of them start out in the independent world. That’s true.

Look at all the people who got their start at Troma. Trey Parker, Samuel L. Jackson, Vincent D'Onofrio, Marissa Tomeii, Kevin Costner. How nice would it be if they were all behind Troma? Imagine the interesting things we could do.