A powerful shot of cinematic ipecac, “Jimmy & Stiggs” is meticulously disgusting. The neon-splattered alien abduction flick took its filmmaker, star, and practical effects wizard Joe Begos four years and roughly $200,000 to make. Genre impresario Eli Roth loved it instantly, and after launching the Horror Section earlier this spring, his new label acquired “Jimmy & Stiggs” for a wide release. On August 15, Begos’ obsessive and bizarre sci-fi nightmare will play in 1,500 theaters.

“You can’t fake authenticity and passion,” said Roth during a recent Q&A — moderated by this reporter, Alison Foreman. “A lot of times horror movies get dismissed because they’re horror movies. This is a work of art. This is David Lynch when he spent six years making ‘Eraserhead,’ or Sam Raimi when he spent years making ‘Evil Dead.’ You can’t fake what these guys did.” 

Following a special early screening of “Jimmy & Stiggs” on June 4 at the IPIC Westwood in Los Angeles, Begos reflected on the months he spent living inside an active body horror set. He didn’t know it then, but it would all feed into the Horror Section’s major push to promote “hardcore, unrated, theatrical event” horror movies. In other words? The guy who made “Hostel” thinks the dude who directed “Bliss” is sitting on the next “Terrifier 3.” Roth got Iconic Events to coordinate this release too, hoping to battle Damien Leone’s Art the Clown with a legion of “melon-headed fucks” and dudes who kill them.

“It’s weird, I still feel like I’m making the fucking movie,” said Begos, who is 37 today and was 33 when production began on the acid dream “X-Files.” “It was my fifth movie when we started. Now, it’s my sixth. I wanted to make a movie that was small and contained, but it also needed to feel like an evolution of my previous films. I just kept upping the ante and trying to build and rebuild those sequences.” 

Speaking on the panel with Roth, the filmmaker was joined by co-star Matt Mercer — aka the “Stiggs” to Begos’ “Jimmy” — and editor Josh Ethier (“Companion”). They’re all producers on the film (Roth holds the executive title) and friends of Begos, who have been in and out of the director’s experimental orbit since he first played with aliens in his 2013 feature debut, “Almost Human.” 

Begos’ latest is a dramatic departure from his past work. Although he’s once again championing 16mm film, the artist tossed aside his typical approach to narrative and cranked up the color for a unique POV he hoped would get him out of a situational rut. Following the pre-pandemic success of “VFW” (2019) and “Bliss” (2020), the lockdown severely impeded Begos’ efforts to capitalize on those films. Like so many others cinephiles, he decided to make a movie that soared above the chaos of COVID — and when restrictions lifted, “Jimmy & Stiggs” came back down to Earth as an ever-more complex project. 

“When he started writing, Joe said, ‘Just let your hair grow as long as you can and your beard grow as long as you can,’” said Mercer. The director and his castmate sport a striking resemblance in the dark extraterrestrial buddy comedy, which is fittingly about frustrated filmmakers. “That wasn’t a problem then,” Mercer says about the sartorial choice, “but I didn’t know it was going to be four years. I went and produced another movie during this and there were other roles that I had to turn down.”  

“You can actually see Matt turn gray in the movie,” Ethier said. “There’s a shot where they’re arguing in the living room. Then they run into the hallway and Joe grabs a gun and starts loading it. The line is like, ‘Why do you have a real gun?’ That whip pan right there is actually about three years. They come into the room and you can physically see them age in the film.” 

The grassroots genre effort had Begos drawing from his well of local industry supporters long before Roth was attached. “Jimmy & Stiggs” went on sabbatical when Begos got the chance to helm “Christmas Bloody Christmas” — a robot Santa movie at Shudder. That project proved a critical holiday bonus that helped pay for Begos’ commitment to singular storytelling, intuitive camera-work, and practical effects that felt out of this world, but required repeat visits to hardware and hobby stores.

“Usually when you’re working on a film, you edit during production and it’s incredibly stressful,” said Ethier. “You’re emailing your director or producer, saying, ‘I think we have everything.’ Whereas here, Joe was like, ‘Here’s the whole scene. How can we make it better? Should we go back and grab this or insert that?’ He dreamed up most of this movie when it wasn’t even written. Then we just went and shot it.” 

That’s how Ethier’s cameo and so many other happy accidents ended up in “Jimmy & Stiggs.” Quipping that continuity is a sign of “weakness,” Ethier said, “All the greats will tell you to cut with movement. That’s all this movie has.” He continued, “I don’t know that it would’ve made sense to have an editor who you’re paying by the hour. It really only makes sense to have your best friend who lives half a mile down the road.” 

The work was undeniably a cinematic marathon that culminated in Begos adding a fight scene that took only hours to write but five months to film. To hear him tell it, four years into shooting the crew was “pretty much dead,” spurring him to reach even deeper into his mothership of genre pros. During the last week of shooting in September 2024 — mere days before his movie was due to makes its world premiere at Beyond Fest — Begos found himself surrounded by horror directors with more accolades and bigger box office returns than his own. Several asked him not to tell the DGA they helped him.

“They were so excited about making a movie like this,” said Begos. Not only did he and Mercer start most days by slathering themselves in neon goo, literally wearing the film’s acidic visual style on their cut-off sleeves, but Begos also used a real chainsaw inside his apartment complex. Contacting Begos after seeing the movie, Roth remembers asking the obvious. 

“I’m like, ‘So wait, that’s a real chainsaw, and you shot that in your apartment?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah,’” said Roth. “I asked, ‘Did the neighbors complain?’ He said, ‘Never once.’ I asked him why and he’s like, ‘I don’t know, man. We’ve been partying here for a while.’” 

Having sharpened his pitchfork as a marketing expert on “Thanksgiving,” Roth is using his reputation as an authentic horror lover to dig deep into the global genre marketplace. Quentin Tarantino helped make the eventual founder of the Horror Section a household name in the mid-2000s. Now, Roth is looking to do the same for people like Begos, who leave their sweat, tears, and day-glow blood all over the screen.

“Eli’s one of the most authentic filmmakers in horror,” said Begos, describing him as the genre’s best cheerleader. “The way you talk about this movie, when you call meetings talking about how we did the last shot or how did you pull this off, it’s like you’re not some exec who’s just trying to make money. You literally know what I put into this movie and that made it feel so much better.”

The “Bliss” director probably broke a few ribs making “Jimmy & Stiggs,” but Begos didn’t make time to go to the doctor. He also flipped over a table during a fight scene and split his head open. The incident ended with Begos repeatedly asking if anyone wanted to watch “Weekend at Bernie’s II.” (Mercer’s worst injury came when he discovered a door he was supposed to break through was bought fully functional at Lowe’s. The crew scored it to make the stunt easier, but Begos was waiting on the other side with the camera when Jimmy and Stiggs collided.)

After Beyond Fest, Begos had several opportunities to send his film to VOD but hung tough.

“You need to take it seriously,” he said. “The way that I approached this movie was like a fucking A-list movie. I took this movie dead serious. I’m not poking fun, I’m not winking and nudging. I’m going to act like this is an A-list movie and I’m against Marlon Brando even though it’s a stupid rubber alien.”

Questioning why paradigm-shaking titles like last year’s “Terrifier 3” aren’t always honored at the Indie Spirits (David Howard Thornton had the same complaint when he spoke with IndieWire), Roth said he didn’t begrudge other genre movies’ their success — but wasn’t even sure how they would define “indie” in light of a batshit crazy story like the one behind “Jimmy & Stiggs.”

“It feels like this would’ve been the VHS tape that we all passed around at school,” said Roth. “That’s pure raw creativity and passion that did that. I see movies that are $200 billion that are fucking boring, but this has such life and it is going to mess some people up.”

Punctuating the message, an unidentified voice in the audience — no doubt belonging to a fan or friend of the filmmaker — took the chance to scream out to Begos, “Yeah, fuck your apartment!” Mercer, Ethier, and Roth, who visited the war-torn unit as recently as May, all agree: Jimmy’s place looks the same.

From Iconic Events and the Horror Section, “Jimmy & Stiggs” is in theaters August 15.