“That film changed our lives,” he recalls. Indeed, Freaks transformed the duo from B-movie mavens to hot directors after the dystopian drama premiered at the Vancouver Film Fest (VIFF).

“I grew up in Vancouver. We made the first film in Vancouver. And as a teenager I went to the Vancouver Film Festival, and got a super pass to not only see five films a day, but go to press screenings for three weeks before the festival,” Lipovsky recalled.

That festival play gave a young Lipovsky crash course in world cinema. “I remember seeing filmmakers up on the stage, presenting their films and wishing one day that would be me,” he added.

Freaks featured Chloe (Lexy Kolker), a girl of 7,  being locked in a ramshackle suburban home by her protective and paranoid father, played by Hirsch.

Now Lipovsky and Stein are returning to Vancouver with their follow-up Freaks 2 screening at the Rio Theatre.

“The first film was very much about a girl who can’t leave her house, and really wants a mom. And in the second film, she’s now much older. So she doesn’t want a mom. What she wants is a friend,” he explained. “And how do you find a friend, and how do you build a relationship in a world where society wants you dead,” Lipovsky adds as he teases Freaks 2.

“We didn’t win, and we were off the lot,” Lipovsky recounted. But, two decades later, he and Stein are in-demand movie directors at work on projects like the Long Lost short story adaptation for Amblin and Universal, as writers on Chris Columbus’ Gremlins 3 and for Sony the animated Venom movie and Metal Gear Solid.

Getting known around Hollywood still has Lipovsky pinching himself. “Over 20 years of making movies, you get very used to things not happening, and very used to people saying something’s happening, and then it doesn’t happen. So when things start to click into place, your brain has a very hard time trying to accept that it’s actually real,” he added.

“Horror is one of the few genres where it’s normal for audiences to show up in theaters for original movies,” Lipovsky says. “It’s the voice of the authors that are creating the work that audiences are becoming attracted to, and even more so when the work is original, and Hollywood is definitely starting to pay attention to that.”

One of the VIFF screenings for Freak 2 will be at the city’s historic Park Theatre, an art deco movie house that Lipovsky helped save from closure as a private investor along with Osgood Perkins, Mike Flanagan, Sean Baker and Finn Wolfhard.

“It’s very special to be able to do the screening there, with a lot of the people that made the movie and a lot of my old friends in the audience and within minutes of where we shot the movie,” he said.