Kuso creator Flying Lotus on his foray into horror and changing people's perception of 'black films'

On the credits of the avant-garde body horror Kuso, the director is credited as Steve. But this is no ordinary Steve.

Steven Ellison, known by his stage name Flying Lotus or sometimes FlyLo, the experimental multi-genre music producer, electronic musician, DJ, filmmaker and rapper from Los Angeles, has just released his debut film.

Kuso gained notoriety at the Sundance Film Festival when patrons ran out of the first midnight screening disgusted at the gross scenes and ugly characters that inhabit the movie. The action takes place in LA in the aftermath of an earthquake and everyone on-screen is covered in boils. If they look disgusting, wait till you see how they behave. There are scenes featuring a fetus being pulled from a woman, a cockroach coming out of a man’s butt and talking boils.

The title is a riff on the Japanese word for “shit” and the melange of animation and live-action conjoins to create a body horror picture in the style of Japanese auteur Takashi Miike. “I wanted to make a movie that would make him smile,” raps Ellison about one of his top five favourite directors.

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But he also wanted the film to change perceptions, not just of Flying Lotus but of his race too: “I wanted to bring that energy into black films and what you consider to be black films.”

He says black directors including Madea Goes To Jail's Tyler Perry, Selma's Ava DuVernay, and even Get Out’s Jordan Peele have not attempted to occupy this schlocky genre. “I wanted to bring something else to the conversation, there is no one else doing it, you know, real horror movies,” he says. “They’ve dabbled, but I wanted to go there. I felt a kind of responsibility to be that person. I know a lot of people won’t like it, but it feels unique to me, and I’m really proud of that.”

It’s a brave move for a man whose musical career brings much adoration. There have been collaborations with the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg and Erykah Badu. He has released five studio albums under the Flying Lotus moniker between 2006 and 2014.

In 2012 he released a rap album under the alias Captain Murphy. “I did that because I was so shy. I thought everyone was going to hate me. I had not put out a rap album before. I’m not an über-confident person. I just sit behind a computer and started rapping and so I didn’t share it with anybody. I tried to do it anonymously for a long time. After a while, I was like f** it, tell people.”

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The fact that his movie starts with an earthquake harks back to his youth: “I was 10 when the 1994 earthquake struck,” he says. “I woke up in the middle of the night and the house was jumping all over the place. I couldn’t even get out of bed all by myself. My mum burst into the room and got me out of bed, it was messed up.

“We had to get out of the house because the shit was falling apart. In addition we were hearing all these sirens, sounding like we’d never heard before, end-of-the-world sirens. It was apocalyptic to me as a child. I’m sure there is more dramatic shit, but to me I got a glimpse of when the world ends, it’s just going to be a lot of people running around the street, with holes in the ground, I pulled from that moment.”

The sense of trauma is still apparent in his voice, even above the background noise coming from the stages of Field Day festival where I meet him. Growing up his first influence was jazz, he is the grandson of singer-songwriter Marilyn McLeod and the great nephew of Alice and John Coltrane. But as a young man growing up in San Fernando Valley, this heritage was a burden.

He recalls: “I didn’t think anyone would care about what I was doing, unless I was a jazz musician.”

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He daydreamed about being a film director, or maybe a musician like hip-hop artist Dr Dre. Listening to Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle added to his sense of being an outcast in his own: “It’s not the kind of place that they embrace you for being a weirdo. You are just left alone with your Nintendo. It was just my life and it didn’t change until I started meeting people, trying to get into the scene and stuff.”

It was the internet that changed things for him. Like so many upcoming musicians of his generation, the go to spot for music was MySpace. He began putting up his playlists and his popularity burgeoned. He was receiving 30,000 plays a day, and that gave him the confidence to pursue music and film, on his own terms.

He studied film at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. It was here that his love of experimental film and music blossomed. He began listening to Madlib and was struck by the multi-instrumentalist’s use of sampling, a feature of his own work.

At times Kuso feels like a sampled hip-hop album put on screen. It’s a cacophony of styles, homages and interrupted narratives, told in short bursts that resemble singles being conjoined on an album. It was also a film that came about in short bursts, which is why it took him over two years to make.

“I never set out for the film to be made a certain way,” he says. “It started off as a cartoon, a five-minute short film, and then that kind of blossomed to me working on another short film, this time live-action, and that was 15 to 20 minutes, and I thought let’s keep going and make a movie.”

He didn’t have a screenplay set out. “I wanted to make a movie where I could learn on the job, without it being destructive to the final movie,” he says.

Such a kinetic approach to filmmaking was also inspired by watching another musician/filmmaker with multiple names at work, Quentin Dupieux, who makes music under the moniker Mr Oizo.

“He is one of the biggest influences who lives near me,” says Ellison. “I’ve been on his film sets before and he showed me things about how to shoot a movie. One of the things he said was make movies like you make your music, use that same energy and way of thinking and that is totally what I do. I don’t know exactly how I’m going to do things, or how it will work out, but that it totally what I do when I sit on the director’s chairs. I try to use that, even if film takes more planning than music.”

So I’m beginning to get to grips with how Ellison has made such an abstract, wild, beguiling and ugly film. There’s the traumatic childhood experience, love of Japanese films, the body horror, the love of sampling and disrupting things, but am I missing something?

“Oh I was experimenting with weed on the movie, because I smoke weed all the time, but for a big percentage of this movie I was sober, because I was really trying to focus,” he says. “Then I thought what happens if I smoke weed and direct when high a little more. And it was way more in tune with what I’m doing and I was able to be more in the moment. I wanted to go on a journey on this kind of thing, where there is a full universe and anything can happen.”

'Kuso' is released on exclusively on Shudder