Multiple Maniacs: A Screenplay

A very John Waters traveling show, replete with freaks, robbery, murder, sex, blasphemy, and savage shellfish—a lurid, surreal celebration of filth and trash.

The Cavalcade of Perversion is a traveling show run by Lady Divine and a crew of her fellow degenerates. They have to drag suburban housewives into each vile, tasteless performance—only to rob them at gunpoint at the end of each show. When Divine gets bored of the routine and graduates to murdering the attendees one day, it sets her off on a rampage, hunting down her cheating lover, Mr. David, and unleashing a chain of frenzy, a truly blasphemous sex act, and a surreal violation by a giant lobster. Multiple Maniacs is John Waters’ paean to the glories of trash. As Lady Divine chants as she marches proudly into downtown Baltimore at the end of the movie, “I’m a maniac! A maniac that cannot be cured! O Divine, I am Di-vine!”

Multiple Maniacs is available in audio here, on its own, or in the The John Waters Screenplay Collection where you can also listen to Waters narrate this iconic film along with five of his other masterpieces, including Pink Flamingos, Hairspray, Flamingos Forever, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux