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Not too many years ago, mainstream porn was getting boring. It was making skips full of money, as ever, but in terms of creativity it was, perhaps appropriately, on its knees. The adult industry had become too adult. A lot of mainstream films lacked fun and personality. And the formulaic ‘insert close-up, three positions, money shot, wrap’ made them predictable and boring. It was all too old. It needed creative stimulation.

At the same time, tattooed, pierced, ballsy, real women were thriving on the internet, and in certain magazines (ahem), and the female pornstar cliché of a bleached blonde with enormous implants and rust-coloured skin, playing dumb, was an anachronism. Eventually, porn reacted. Different, cooler people started making films, and it was about more than two clichés fucking each other’s brains out. It became more real; it became more interesting. Out of the change, ‘Alt Porn’ was born.

Well, sort of. Precisely where Alt Porn started is impossible to say. A lot of people say SuicideGirls was the beginning, and they’re probably right, although when SG launched in 2001 – “just to see hot punk-rock girls naked”, according to its creators – there was already Blue Blood magazine and websites like Raverporn.net, NekkidNerds.com and GothicSluts.com offering ‘sub-cultural erotica’ for the enlightened. What gives strength to SG’s claims is that its mix of goth, punk and alt-girls not wearing much exploded on popular culture and ended up a global brand. Its travelling burlesque dance show even opened for Guns N’ Roses.

One of the photographers of some early SG photosets was a young guy who now goes by the name Eon McKai. (It’s a tribute to Ian McKaye from the band Minor Threat.) While still at film school at California Institute of the Arts, Eon broadcast a video of one of his teachers having sex with a student on the college’s public-access channel. “You test your boundaries at college,” he says. “You’ve got to fucking have balls. It’s like a videogame where you work out how much crazy shit you can do before you die.”

After grad school he “found mentors” in the adult industry, then pitched the idea of the SuicideGirls aesthetic transferred to film to porn company VCA. They loved it and let him make movies for them. Two years later, Vivid poached him to take control of their new Vivid Alt imprint. He’s brought successful, well-regarded photographers like Dave Naz and Octavio Arizala into the business of directing.

“The biggest force in all of it, in terms of popularising it, was SuicideGirls,” he says. “That’s kind of where I come to it from. I was very much part of that community when it started. I wanted to make movies, and I drew that line from SG into adult film and kind of brought that audience in. I bridged the gap between SuicideGirls and existing hardcore porn.”

Also bridging that gap was BurningAngel.com, an outfit that popped up about the same time SG launched. Its creator, Joanna Angel, also went on to become part of the Alt scene. She describes her site as similar to SG but claims it takes things that crucial bit further. “SuicideGirls started around the same time as us but we had hardcore stuff. We were really the only people out there that had the types of girls we had.” Using $500 of her own money, Joanna set up Burning Angel, and then spent the next two years finishing college. Although updates were sporadic during that time – once a month, sometimes once every six weeks – and she admits the website was “fucked-up-looking” and “barely worked”, people still subscribed. They couldn’t get enough of the girls on her site.

A trip to a porn convention soon after she finished college convinced her to move into films. “I saw there was a severe lack of my personality, my attitude and my girls in the porn industry, so I decided I wanted to make porn; I just wanted to make it in my own way.”

But that’s only half the story. It was about more than an aesthetic. Tattooed women in porn weren’t new. In many ways, Belladonna is the archetypal Alt girl and she’d been in porn long before Alt debuted on the scene. And aesthetically, Rob Rotten’s film Little Runaways might be a better reference point for Alt’s genesis. (Although he wouldn’t agree, as he’s hates Alt Porn and has even bought the URL ‘Fuckalt.com’, and linked it to the front page of his website, which features the quote: “I feel the same way about Alt Porn as I do about herpes – Rob Rotten.”) McKai reckons there is a different attitude in Alt Porn.

“One key component of Alt Porn is that there is this passion and drive in the people making the movies,” he says. “The first movie I produced for Vivid Alt, The Rebelle Rousers, was totally not my scene but [director] Octavio ‘Winkytiki’ Arizala is real to the street and part of the rockabilly, psychobilly movement in LA and he’s making a movie for his tribe.”

“I was pretty much making a movie for my friends,” says Arizala. “It focuses on something I’m very passionate about. My reputation for years has been as a pin-up photographer, mostly in the genre of 50s and 60s. I brought the whole aesthetic that I had been shooting as a still photographer into video. The retro/rockabilly subcultures are very protective of their own turf, so not just anybody could have come out and done this and got a little bit of respect from the people it’s aimed at.”

And that, according to McKai, is impossible to fake. “I think it really has to be your true skin, or people aren’t really into it.”

Kimberly Kane works on both sides of the camera. She directed Naked And Famous, one of the signature films of Alt Porn, and Triple Xstasy. And she’s appeared in front of the camera in lots of others, like Jack the Zipper’s Stuntgirl and Squealer. Along with people like Faith Leon, Sasha Gray, Charlotte Stokely, Belladonna, Kylee Kross and Dana DeArmond, she is a leading light of Alt.

“Alt isn’t just a paycheque,” she says. “Alt is the name of our gang. It’s a very special little project that people nurture and love. And how films should be. You should care about it and be proud of it, not just throw garbage out there. ‘Throw enough shit on the wall and some of it will stick’ is really not my way of doing it.”

The concepts and styling on her on the films are all hers – “right down to toenail polish,” she says – and she chooses the talent from women she thinks are cool, beautiful and talented. “You have to bring style into porn; porn doesn’t have it at all, really.

“Fake tits, hair extensions – that girl still appeals to my stepdad, you know, but that trophy wife is being filtered out. I’m not a trophy, I’m a filmmaker… and I’m also a slut. Tastes are changing. I would never use some bubble-headed bimbo to star in a movie. She’s like a stripclub monster to me.”

Alt is definitely, in part, a reaction against the porn staples of the past. Jack the Zipper was a tattoo artist in New York when he made his first porn film, Stuntgirl, for a dare. “I kind of made an anti-porno,” he says. “I was reacting to what I thought was a sorry state of affairs. I thought there was a lot of garbage. The product was weak and everybody made fun of it. Porn is a weird artform that has so much power, but it was being treated like a bastard.”

Jack doesn’t really consider himself ‘Alt Porn’, but lots of other people do. Even if he’s not technically part of the Alt ‘scene’, he’s speaking their language. His dark visions, which he says are inspired by “demented girls” from his life, Grindhouse and Dali, among other things, have won him Best All Sex Release AVN award for the last three years in a row, and Best Director for two of the last three years. He says he wants his films to be like Rocco Siffredi meets Andrew Blake.

“I had a method in mind, but it was just to do what I felt like doing. I didn’t think there would be any rules. I thought rules were out the window considering how people were treating the adult-movie business. I had a theory: Don’t follow any rules; just do what you want. I just felt like making something I hadn’t ever seen before. I think that struck a chord with a lot of people. I kicked the door open and then the Alt thing came in that door, so I got lumped in.”

It might be about how you look. It might be, as Eon has said, about putting something between the fucking. It might be, as Joanna Angel says, about a punk-rock attitude, ethos and ethic. But Dave Naz uses a different musical analogy to describe Alt best.

“Do you remember Sub Pop, when they were doing Nirvana and Mudhoney and those kind of bands?” says Naz. “None of the bands sounded alike but you knew what you were getting. You weren’t getting this radio-friendly thing, you were getting something unique, something that was up and coming? To me, that’s kind of what I see with the Alt Porn thing.”

Whatever it is, thank God it arrived.