The Artist Formerly Known as Brent Corrigan Talks Chillerama

Out today on DVD and Blu-ray, horror anthology Chillerama is the ultimate midnight movie — an energetically charged ode to gory B-grade flicks, complete with goofiness, splattered guts, and plenty of gross-out erotic humor.

While three of the four stories are hetero-centric (including Wadzilla, about an evil giant sperm that terrorizes New York City; The Diary of Anne Frankenstein, a WWII spoof featuring a fey Hitler trying to create a people-killing machine; and Zom-B-Movie, a perverted spoof of — you guessed it — zombie movies), the lone gay star, I Was A Teenage Werebear, is a musical send-up of teen angst beach and slasher movies that stars Sean Paul Lockhart, an actor best known to gay audiences as adult film performer and mogul Brent Corrigan.

Werebear’s director, Tim Sullivan, one of the few openly gay horror filmmakers, says he had always wanted to spoof the teen movies he grew up watching — movies he believed clandestinely dealt with homo issues. "As a gay kid," Sullivan tells The Advocate, "I would look at movies like Rebel Without a Cause, and I knew that it was about Sal Mineo being in love with James Dean. And I would get all the subtext. To me, The Outsiders is the most homo movie ever made. The Lost Boys — the list goes on and on."

The idea for Werebear came from a discussion with fellow Chillerama contributor Adam Rifkin. "We were like, 'what if Richie Cunningham fell in love with Fonzie,'" Sullivan recalls, "'and when they got aroused they turned into leather daddies?' And we just ran with it."

Despite Lockhart’s notorious past, Sullivan says casting the adult performer in the lead role of Ricky was a no-brainer. "I was looking for a teen idol type. And my friend Todd Stephens, who I went to college with, had done a movie called Another Gay Sequel, in which Sean played a merman.

"I know this is going be very hard for people to believe, but I had not seen — and still have not seen — any of Sean’s porn," the director says. "I’m very much aware of who Brent Corrigan is — I read the story about him in Rolling Stone and I'd seen pictures of him — and I was always struck by how much he looked like Zac Efron. But after seeing Another Gay Sequel, I thought, This kid has got great screen presence and some incredible comedic timing. And when he came in and met with us, I was really impressed by his professionalism and how articulate he was."