Nails has also made several short films, including God is Dad, The Ramones and I, Grethel and Hansel, Animated Corpse, and Santiago vs. Wigface, which won a special recognition award.
[1] He made his first foray into the genre in the 1980s with his punk rock band, The Creeps, for whom he sang and about such subjects as teenage violence ("On TV") and being turned into a zombie by a virulent strain of pimples ("Acne").
Nails released music by The Creeps on his own label, Wasted Effort Records, along with other local bands like fellow punkers The Angry Kids, the busker street-pop duo Egg (whose members left to join Caroliner Rainbow and found The Presidents of the United States of America), and post-hardbore band Cabal for whom Nails also played bass.
Many of his lyrics he wrote for both The Creeps and Cabal reflected these values, and Wasted Effort's releases often contained information and literature from groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
He extended his stay at Colombia by several years in order to complete his first feature-length work, Acne (whose title song is performed by Nails' old punk band), a black-and-white horror film about a pair of teenagers who wake up to find themselves mutated into horribly strange creatures.