Freaked At 30: A Look Back At Alex Winter And Tom Stern's Cult Classic Comedy

From box office disaster to seminal '90s cult classic, "Freaked" has had one hell of a wild ride. A subversive comedy about an arrogant actor who crosses paths with a malevolent sideshow operator and becomes part of his troupe (courtesy of some nasty goo called Zygrot 24), "Freaked" is built on a throne of grotesque practical effects and absurdist humor. Although it was initially regarded with a great deal of promise by the 20th Century Fox executive who greenlit it, a studio shakeup that resulted in his ousting saw "Freaked" effectively shelved. It had its post-production budget slashed and was given a barebones theatrical release, dooming it to financial failure. But this little freakshow-that-could surpassed all expectations, eventually becoming a cult classic once it hit cable television, finally finding the audiences that would appreciate it for all its twisted charm. This is the weird, rollercoaster journey of "Freaked," to celebrate the 30th anniversary of its release.

For those who didn't spend a significant part of the 1990s watching "Freaked" on cable, the film revolves around the character of Ricky Coogan (Alex Winter), a spoiled former child actor who is in talks to take a big paycheck in exchange for providing a celebrity endorsement for the shady E.E.S. (Everything Except Shoes) corporation. They're developing a new chemical compound — Zygrot 24 — to be used in fertilizer which, predictably, is incredibly toxic and will cause untold environmental damage. Coogan doesn't particularly care, though, as long as the check doesn't bounce. He heads to their headquarters in South America, only to run afoul of the malevolent owner of Freek Land, Elijah C. Skuggs (Randy Quaid), who uses Zygrot 24 to turn Coogan and his friends (played by Michael Stoyanov and Megan Ward) into the latest, monstrous members of his sideshow. Together with the rest of the other freaks, they have to figure out a way to steal the antidote and escape from Skuggs if they have any hope of returning to their normal lives.

"We were pretty disillusioned and we were thinking, 'Do we want to make this kind of movie? What do we really want to do?' So we decided to try to make something that really went for it and did not try to kowtow to commercialism, to just do something crazy that we wanted to see," Stern explained in an interview with Nerdist. With their success on "The Idiot Box" and Alex Winter's growing clout as an actor fresh off the cultural phenomenon of "Bill and Ted," the two filmmakers were in a position to pitch their passion project to studios.

And pitch it they did. Again. And again. And again. But for some reason, they got not a single bite. In fairness, their original concept was even further outside the box than what the finished film actually became. "Freaked" began life as "Hideous Mutant Freekz," what Winter described on the Junk Food Dinner podcast as "a $200,000 Butthole [Surfers] vehicle ... 'Evil Dead 2' meets a Butthole show." Unlike "Freaked," which blends elements of comedy and body horror, "Hideous Mutant Freekz" would have leaned far more towards ultra-violence. "We basically thought it would be a Butthole Surfers musical, so there would be Elijah the mad scientist, and his children would be the Butthole Surfers. We brainstormed up this crazy X-rated R-comedy art film kind of thing," Tom Stern told Nerdist. But it was not to be. Every studio they pitched it to passed on the initial concept, assuming — perhaps rightfully so — that it would be a tough sell for audiences. Winter went on to acknowledge in the same interview with Junk Food Dinner, "We couldn't sell it, unsurprisingly ... I don't think anyone would have seen the movie we were writing."

Thus, "Freaked" was born. (Or rather, "Hideous Mutant Freekz," as it was known at the time — that title lingered well into production, and there was even an E! "Behind the Scenes" making-of special that referred to it by that name). They were given $12 million to make the film, far beyond what they originally envisioned for their ultra-low budget project, but those funds would become incredibly necessary due to the extensive practical effects required for "Freaked." Still, although this was much more money than they'd had at their disposal during previous projects, it was a modest budget by Hollywood standards — something Winter believed worked to their advantage. "Because we were given so little money we were basically given complete creative freedom. It was a very liberating experience for us. We basically got to — provided we didn't mind not being able to eat or clothe ourselves — we were able to really run rampant," he told Nerdist.

For their team of freaks, they largely assembled a cast filled with actors they'd worked with in the past. Some had worked with them on their previous collaboration, "The Idiot Box," like Lee Arenberg, who played The Eternal Flame. Others had been regulars in Winter's short films, including John Hawkes, who had starred in "Bar-B-Que Movie," an 11-minute spoof of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" that also featured the Butthole Surfers. A number of other cast members were part of the Actors' Gang, a theater group based out of Culver City, California, which Winter was already familiar with. But although this was an oddball little project with two fairly green directors who were then just making their feature-length debut, there were many actors who were eager to be a part of it.

But the biggest role they had to fill was that of the film's main villain, a manic freakshow owner called Elijah C. Skuggs. Winter and Stern went through a number of possible actors, including Oliver Reed, George C. Scott, and Rip Torn. Reed was nixed by the studio because he had a rider in his contract that stipulated he could drink whenever he wanted, something executives clearly saw as a recipe for disaster. Scott was similarly removed from consideration, because he was considered uninsurable at the time — Winter jokingly speculated that it was probably because he insulted a studio executive at one point or another. 

Finally, they landed on Randy Quaid, a quirky character actor who at that point was best known for his brief tenure on "Saturday Night Live" and his role as Cousin Eddie in the "Vacation" franchise. Quaid took to the role immediately, referring to the character on the E! "Behind the Scenes" special as "a cross between Colonel Sanders and Dr. Frankenstein." He went on to discuss what made Skuggs so appealing to him, saying "I've always wanted to play a mad scientist, and I've always wanted to play an evangelist, and he seemed to me to have kind of both of these qualities. I've never played a character, I don't think, this broad on screen before. He's one of these characters you can go a long way with without going over the top. You have a lot of room to play there."

So much of what happened on the set of "Freaked" was made up as they went along. "We used to get into horrendous fights with production design and makeup," Winter remembered in a conversation with Junk Food Dinner. "It was really fricking complicated! We had a long-running feud over whether the Worm would ever walk. We have one great high shot of him walking away trying to convince Rick to join the ranks." From restructuring RC components and custom-building their own monster rigs to developing incredibly involved facial prosthetics, everyone was working at the top of their game. It was an "insane braintrust of creativity," as Winter phrased it.

But that didn't mean it was without its complications. Encasing actors in giant, cobbled-together mechanical suits meant that their hearing was impaired, and the only way of communicating was through receivers inside their costumes — receivers that didn't always work. "It can be frustrating at times when you feel like you're really doing the scene well and then one of the monster's radios will malfunction," Quaid recalled in the E! "Behind the Scenes" special. The technical limitations of the production sometimes caused brief problems, but for the most part, it seemed like everyone was energized by the challenges they faced. "Just [to] work with these people all day, every day, it was an incredible set to be on because in that way it was a freak show of, like, anyone who was doing interesting stuff in L.A.," Winter said to Nerdist.

Actress Megan Ward had nothing but praise for Fox head Joe Roth, crediting him with being a supportive shepherd of the film throughout its production process in her conversation with Bullz-Eye.com. "[It was] so cool, because he's so cool. He has a sense of humor ... but the problem was is that he wasn't there when we were finishing it."

Roth, who had been such a fervent champion of their work on the film, was fired from 20th Century Fox. "It was devastating," Stern told Nerdist. "Joe Roth was a huge fan of the film, he was ready to give us more money. This was really a film that they thought they were going to make money with. We were working on the edits and started to get our list of songs together for the soundtrack. But then he was gone." In his place was Peter Chernin, a studio executive who was, shall we say, less enthused about the project. It makes sense that any incoming higher-up at 20th Century Fox would want to take a close look at the projects already in the pipeline, eager to make their own mark on the studio's slate and also to minimize any damage from their predecessors. It was immediately clear that Chernin was not a fan of "Freaked."

On his very first day, they held a test screening of the film — one that didn't go particularly well, as Tom Stern recalls. "It was a disaster. Everyone's throwing popcorn and drink cups and not paying attention to the movie. It was not a good screening and that was Peter Chernin's first day and he was like, 'You know what, I'm not releasing this movie.'"

The cuts came fast and hard. Their budget was slashed, leaving them little money for their ambitious post-production process. Worst of all, their theatrical release was pared down to basically nothing, along with their advertising budget — when the film finally hit theaters, it ended up premiering on just two screens, ultimately making about $30,000. To call its release a disappointment is understating things by several orders of magnitude.

But perhaps the most frustrating element of all of this is the fact that the audiences who did see the final product fell in love with it. "Freaked" was featured in the Midnight Madness program at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it earned rave reviews and great word-of-mouth press. Since 20th Century Fox had effectively washed its hands of the film, however, much of the promotion was left up to Tom Stern and Alex Winter. They became a two-man advertising team, putting in the legwork to get it shown at individual theaters and running around town with, Winter claims, one poster and one print that they would have to collect from the theater afterward to keep the whole thing going.

There was an immediate appetite for the film, but in the analog days of the 1990s, it was hard to maintain any momentum. "We had instant affirmation, it was a huge hit at Toronto, we got fantastic reviews and at that point, every repertory house all over the world wanted to show it. So it was an immediate cult hit, the problem was that it wasn't the age of DVDs yet so it was hard to sustain it," Winter explained to IndieWire. "It would happen in bursts, we were all over the world with it the year after we made it."