Trash, Blood, and Celluloid: Revisiting Andy Milligan and the World of Exploitation

From the honest, absorbing doc “The Degenerate” to essential films, we revisit the trash auteur Andy Milligan and the legacy of exploitation.

Andy Milligan was never meant for the mainstream. His films were too cheap, too raw, too abrasive to ever be mistaken for prestige cinema. Yet buried beneath the sleaze and screaming lies one of exploitation’s most fascinating figures—a queer outsider whose jagged body of work helped define the unruly energy of grindhouse.

With the new documentary The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan as our guide, this article takes a journey through his life, his films, and the wider legacy of exploitation cinema.

But before we dig into Milligan’s films and the world of exploitation he inhabited, it’s worth starting with The Degenerate itself, a riveting documentary that not only tells his story but reframes why his work deserves to be remembered.