Role Models, by John Waters, is published by Beautiful Books, priced £15.99

Pull on a pair of stripy nylon socks, buff up on beat writers, and bring your sick sense of humour into the Baltimore home of the camp, gore-loving writer and director with that moustache, John Waters.

His filth flicks Mondo Trasho (1969), in which an unconscious hit-and-run victim has bird-like monster feet transplanted on to this body, and Pink Flamingos (1972), which sees rotund cross-dresser Divine scoffing dog shit, made Waters one of Hollywood’s biggest shockers. Meanwhile, his mainstream hits Hairspray (1988) and Cry-Baby (1990) brought edgy suburban campness to the big screen.

Now aged 64, the lowbrow Baltimore boy who nurtured an obsession with crime, grime and outsiders while he was growing up in the 1950s and 60, is wrapped up in his new book, Role Models. It’s an autobiography of sorts, in which he remembers the deviants, criminals and creative people who’ve influenced him most, such as Manson family acolyte Leslie Van Houten, English novelist Denton Welch, artist Cy Twombly and underground pornographer Bobby Garcia.

But Waters’ real diary – a collection of photos – is hidden upstairs in his gothic home, and Bizarre is about to become its latest addition.

MULTIPLE MANIACS

Ushered in through the hall, past a replica electric chair made by set designer Vince Peranio for Divine’s final scene in Female Trouble, and a plastic machine gun from the classic 1950s flick Guys And Dolls that was given to him by Johnny Depp, we go through the Waters right of passage. Stopping on the stairs leading to his office, Waters picks up one of two plastic 1980s Polaroid cameras lying on the carpet, and hurriedly takes a photograph of us.

Since Waters was given the cameras as a gift in 1990, he’s been snapping every person that enters his home – plumbers and people who come to read the gas meter, as well celebrity totty and close friends. “These pictures are a record of my life,” Waters explains. “Who I allow into my home is my real life.”

Without paying much attention to the result, Waters shoves the picture next to cardboard boxes stuffed with thousands of snaps, making sure we don’t get too close to them. These photos are for him alone. “Sometimes these snaps are so depressing,” he says. “I look at all the people who’ve died – people who didn’t know that they were going to die when I took their picture – and I can see everybody getting older, and putting on or losing weight.

“When I’m going through a rough time with someone, sometimes I want to rip up their picture. But I never do.”

Waters began his pictorial diary the year he moved into his imposing home in northern Baltimore, which was designed in 1925 by famous local architect Laurence Hall Fowler. It stands out like a daddy-long-legs on a wedding cake on his leafy street, which is punctuated by chintzy villas and neat lawns. As a boy, Waters passed the house every day on his way to school and he coveted it for 30 years.

“I’ve always loved this house,” he says. “It looks like Dracula lived here, but it was never for sale. In 1985, when I was looking to buy somewhere, I walked up and knocked on the door. A nice woman answered and said, ‘Oh, you’re John Waters’, and then I pestered her for five years until she sold it to me.”

Inside, the quiet, clean, air-conditioned house looks as though it belongs to a studious academic, not the filmmaker who William Burroughs dubbed ‘The Pope Of Trash’. Ranging from heavy tomes on Catholicism to pulp porno such as Enter From The Rear, the books on his shelves are neatly doubled up, and his living room is furnished with tasteful antique side tables and well-cared-for oriental rugs. But while there aren’t any vintage dildos poking out of drawers and the walls are blood-and-cum-stain free, Water’s perverse touch peeks out from behind an antique lampshade, where he has a model of the Pentagon after it was bombed on 9/11 – one of the ‘Buildings Of Disaster’ designed by Boym Partners.

MONDO TRASHO

In a small room off the stairs, Waters has an installation he commissioned from artist Gregory Green of an imaginary bomb maker’s lair, called ‘Work Table Number Seven’. “I saw one of Gregory’s bomb factories in a gallery in New York and had to have one. Mine’s the only one at a private home in America,” he says, proudly. “It’s every single thing that you’d need to blow up a stadium, except the gunpowder, and it includes every detail of the bomber’s life, from his ex-wife’s pubic hair to a rosary. It’s like a biography of a bomber and you figure out his life by studying the details.”

Green lived in the house for a week while he worked on it, but Waters didn’t peek until it was finished. Fortunately, he let us see it. “I want it to be like Pompeii and eventually be covered in dirt,” he says. “The only thing I’m concerned about is my home exterminator – a guy who comes once a month to check I don’t have any infestations. If I get a new one, he won’t know about the Green installation and he’ll think I’m a terrorist.”

Waters loves witty, surprising art like Green’s, and admires anyone who holds extreme beliefs. “Bombers have always interested me. I don’t necessarily want to be one, but I’m interested in people who are driven to extreme acts – whether they’re good or bad,” he says.

Art and objects that fit the bill fill the house. Prints of Cy Twombly’s neurotic scratchings adorn the dining room, and platefuls of fake fried food, plastic sushi and other inedible goodies lurk in every corner. Even the immaculately tiled downstairs loo has a row of cookies on the cistern. “My plastic food obsession started with pop art – with Claes Oldenburg, who made art that I could never afford,” sighs Waters. “It was easier to find fake food and, when I went to Tokyo, there was a lot of it. Almost every restaurant has whatever they serve inside, displayed outside in wax. But the best ones are in thrift shops, like ugly, old carrots, or single pickles – the most pitiful things that you can find.”

EAT YOUR MAKEUP

Waters exacts his daily routine with military precision. Getting up at 6am every day, he reads six or seven newspapers while drinking buckets of tea, before sitting down at 8am to write or come up with new ideas. At noon, Waters meets with his assistants to “go about selling whatever he thought up in the morning”, and his evenings are spent watching films or reading – last night he read Filthy Talk For Troubled Times, plays by Neil LaBute. On Friday he cuts loose in Baltimore’s gay bars and biker clubs and, by Sunday, he’s ready to ignore the phone and slouch on his red sofa with yet more literature.

In his youth, Waters made friends with many of the drag queens, thugs and freaks who populated the nightscape of his youth, and became the inspiration for his films. But there were a few people he admired and never met, such as a transvestite called Pencil.

“He teased his hair into a beehive and wore skinny girls’ black jeans, tennis shoes and a blouse that looked like a girls’ blouse,” he remembers. “But it wasn’t like he was in a dress or anything. That was confusing. He was street and everyone found him alarming, including gay people. I’d never seen scary drag queen people like that in suburban Baltimore and I didn’t know they existed. I think about him still because he had the nerve to lead a life that I didn’t want – a life that was certainly more extreme than mine.”

Twenty years on, and many of Waters' closest friends have died – including his childhood friend Divine, whose birth certificate sits on a shelf in his office. He also keeps a few presents from his fans around, including a model of Divine on the rampage from a scene in Female Trouble. “I appreciate my fans; they’re my customers,” explains Waters.

While Waters won’t tell us if he has any stalkers, he admits that he won’t write to any of his fans more than once for fear of encouraging them. But recalling a recent encounter with a Waters-lover sends his mouth into a smirk that accentuates the pencil ’tache on his top lip.

“I did a book signing in Brooklyn a couple of weeks ago where a girl came dressed as my socks,” he laughs. “I thought it was great – she had on miss-matched material from head-to-toe.”

DESPERATE LIVING

Even though Waters has lived in New York and San Francisco – and still has houses in both cities – he finds the fringe folk in Baltimore more shocking. “When I go to New York, I find the kind of people I was drawn to in Baltimore in the mid-1960s, but they’re being ironic,” he says. “None of the people on the edge of society in Baltimore are ironic. They don’t give a shit about celebrity. Nobody takes phone pictures of me.”

Cherishing that kind of democracy, Waters has hosted a Christmas party every year at his house since he was 18, inviting everybody that he knows from his friend and casting director Pat Moran to the guy who works in the hardware shop around the corner.

“Nothing bad has ever happened at those parties and it’s the one I most look forward to,” he says. “But last year, it was held during the biggest blizzard we’ve ever had in Baltimore.

The caterers came, so I had food and liquor for 200 people, but it was illegal to go out, so only about 70 people came – and they were the ones who live nearest and are the most insane. Come to think of it, they were mostly the people I would’ve kicked off my list if I’d had to cut it, and my assistants. But it was fun.”

Role Models, by John Waters, is published by Beautiful Books, priced £15.99