Nice piece from The Playlist

From the 92nd St Y Tribeca Freaked Q&A:

Cult films come in all shapes and sizes. Some hit right out of the gate with a small but rabid audience while others are discovered over a longer period of time. Somehow both are these scenarios are true for Alex Winter and Tom Stern’s gloriously gonzo “Freaked.”
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“About a year ago, the guys at the New Beverly in L.A., who I know really well, were trying to show the movie,” Winter said. “And I was like, ‘There’s no print, it doesn’t exist.’ It turned out that Phil Blankenship, who runs the New Beverly, who’s a total God in the world of repertory cinema, found a guy in the Midwest who worked at a place where, basically movies go to die. They exterminate negatives and the day after Phil called me and I [told him] there’s no print, he called me and said, ‘Dude, they’re going to exterminate ‘Freaked!’ [I said] ‘What do you mean?’ [Phil] was like, ‘My friend says it’s like the dog pound [for films]. They wanted me to exterminate ‘Freaked!’ but luckily he was a cool guy so [instead] he stole it.”