If the chief enemy of creativity is good taste, as Pablo Picasso apparently once said, let us add that it’s also toxic to common sense.

An apoplectic review of Kuso appeared in Variety condemning the film’s “juvenile scatology” after a notorious Sundance screening in January; this from an establishment magazine that routinely gives a pass to insidious propaganda efforts like the recent Megan Leavey, a war picture that asks us to weep for a traumatized dog while portraying Iraqis as subhuman.

In Hollywood’s inverted moral framework, the soaring, mind-bending creativity of a film like Kuso is somehow—what? Indecorous? To coin another, more anonymous quote, “Shit is fucked up and bullshit.” What’s a real artist to do?

“I had to show people the fuckin’ ugly, man,” explains Steve Ellison, calling the Straight from Los Angeles.

More familiar to the world as EDM superweirdo Flying Lotus, Ellison is now the writer-director of a movie—premiering today (July 21) on the horror streaming service Shudder.com—dubbed “the grossest ever” by those tastemakers at the Guardian.

“I think we spend so much time trying to hide from it, calling it something else, cutting away from it. Art has just become so crowdpleasy and safe and PG-13. I’m like, ‘Fuck this, man.’ I come from Paul Verhoeven times. I wanna show you all the ugly.”

With demented Brit animator David Firth as his ally, Ellison fully succeeds, with phenomenal artistry, in showing us the ugly. Kuso depicts a phantasmagorically hellish version of L.A. after an earthquake (although that doesn’t really explain why everyone is covered in boils) achieved through impressively sick animation, appallingly hilarious live-action sequences, and nausea-inducing soundtrack contributions from friends like Aphex Twin.

Inside this Boschian nightmare realm—and this is just an appetizer—blunt-smoking transdimensional creatures (voiced by Hannibal Buress and Donnell Rawlings) perform snap abortions on their pregnant roommate, while a diseased and balding schoolkid lovingly feeds his own shit to a head sprouting from the ground, and a cockroach-lobster creature called Mr. Quiggle climbs out of George Clinton’s butthole in majestically tight close-up. (“He’s got so many doo-doo jokes all throughout his discography, man,” Ellison replies, when asked how he pitched that to the funk legend. “George digs that shit, ya know?”)

Even if you’re mortally offended by the content, it’s impossible to fault the depth of Ellison’s vision or the chops on display. The film swims in shit, pus, and cum, but Kuso mostly reeks of obsession.

“I kinda ducked out of being Flying Lotus intentionally in the height of my moment—I’m, like, at the Grammys—while I’m working on my movie,” Ellison says. “I was not even engaged in any of that, because I was in the throes of my film, just trying to do this thing. I spent a lot of money that I didn’t know if I was ever gonna get back or not, and lost a lot of time. When I started working on the movie I was dating this girl, she was really amazing, but I kinda had to just get in the zone, man, and I couldn’t really kick it, you know? I just had to be on the computer all the time.”

After the negative buzz from Kuso’s Sundance appearance—the “quote-unquote walkout thing,” as he puts it—Ellison says he’s warmed by the fan reaction so far.

“It’s all been really, really good. The conversations that we’ve been having, people are exploring their own anxieties and I think they’re seeing the art in it, and I’m really grateful for that,” he says.

And as for those who don’t go for jokes about dick-stabbing and shit-babies?

“When I first came out with my music, people had the same reaction,” Ellison answers with a laugh. “They didn’t know what to do, they didn’t know what to call it or if they were allowed to dance to it, or what. It freaked people out, they didn’t know where to put me, and this is the same thing. I’d be fuckin’ up if everyone liked this movie, let’s just be real, right? If this was a total fuckin’ crowdpleaser, then I’m doing it wrong.”