Growing up in Baltimore in the 1950s, John Waters was not like other children; he was obsessed by violence and gore, both real and on the screen. With his weird counter-culture friends as his cast, he began making silent 8mm and 16mm films in the mid-'60s; he screened these in rented Baltimore church halls to underground audiences drawn by word of mouth and street leafleting campaigns. As his filmmaking grew more polished and his subject matter more shocking, his audiences grew bigger, and his write-ups in the Baltimore papers more outraged. By the early 1970s he was making features, which he managed to get shown in midnight screenings in art cinemas by sheer perseverance. Success came when Pink Flamingos - a deliberate exercise in ultra-bad taste - took off in 1973, helped no doubt by lead actor Divine's infamous dog-crap eating scene.

Waters continued to make low-budget shocking movies with his Dreamland repertory company until Hollywood crossover success came with Hairspray in 1987, and although his movies nowadays might now appear cleaned up and professional, they retain Waters' playfulness, and reflect his lifelong obsessions.
His favorite childhood memory was seeing real blood on the seat of a wrecked car when visiting a scrap yard and fantasizing about lethal car crashes. As a youth he would watch adult-only films at the local drive-in, with binoculars. He is obsessed with true-crime and regularly attends gory trials all over the US, where he often sees the same faces in the public galleries. Brother of Steve Waters. Subscribes to more than 80 magazines. Also goes to see just about every movie that comes out and hardly ever rents movies. Has taught classes at the Patuxent Institution, a correctional facility located halfway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The classes are meant as rehabilitation therapy for convicted killers, in which they learn to write about their violent fantasies rather than act them out. Waters has always been very gracious in acknowledging his creative influences, such as Russ Meyer, Otto Preminger, Liberace, William Castle, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Jayne Mansfield, Robert Bresson, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. As a youth, he made as much as $50 a week doing puppet shows for the neighborhood children, and was often hired to entertain at birthday parties. He stated that many of his puppet shows were inspired by the gimmick-heavy films of William Castle. Bears such a strong resemblance to actor Steve Buscemi that as a joke, John Waters sent out cards with a photo of Buscemi made up to look like Waters. Big fan of 1950s director Douglas Sirk and actually got to meet him while in Europe. Grew his thin pencil-line mustache in honor of Little Richard. Member of jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995 Waters originally wanted a man named "Mr. Ray" to be the narrator of Pink Flamingos. Mr. Ray was famous for his hair-weave radio ads and for his Baltimore accent. Mr. Ray refused, so Waters recorded the voice-over himself, imitating Mr. Ray's voice as "Mr. J." There is a special section of his immense book collection devoted to Liberace.