12 Creepiest Stories About Famous Movie Directors

9. Larry Clark's Career-Long Obsession With Young, Naked Bodies

The Story: Larry Clark spent decades as a photographer before making his first film, Kids, in 1995 at the age of 52. The highly controversial film dealt with a number of sexually-active teens during the AIDS crisis in the mid-1990s, and while acclaimed in some quarters, was deemed exploitative and borderline child pornography by others.

This is a tenet running throughout Clark's films: his 2002 film in particular, Ken Park, was highly divisive due to the graphic nudity of the young actors involved, causing one critic to say, "Larry Clark's cinema has, if nothing else, very specifically delineated the line drawn by the American court's decency standards under the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act". The debate is such: is Clark simply shining an honest light on today's American youth, or is he just a creepy old guy who wants to film young naked people all day?

Creep-O-Meter: 7/10

Clark's work is extremely divisive and as such there will be different answers here depending on your view of his filmography, but it's often said that his films simply don't have enough substance to make his line-crossing efforts actually seem worth it. His films too often just reek of a director indulging his fetishes under the guise of "art" and getting paid for it.