To paraphrase 19th-century philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche, that which does not kill Debbie Rochon makes her stronger. The actress with over 125 horror, exploitation and other genre features on her résumé, and current co-host of Sirius' FANGORIA RADIO, was born in farmlands outside of Vancouver, British Columbia, to an alcoholic father and a mother afflicted with a rare form of polio, which required frequent hospitalizations. "She basically lost the use of her body," Rochon recalls, beginning a long discussion of a past more horrific than any of her screen roles. "With all the turmoil within the house, I'd show up at school wearing clothes with holes in them, sitting in class trying to hold the holes closed. I'd get called into the counselor's room, and they'd sew them up and ask me questions. After a couple years of that, we'd get visits at our home. Finally, during my mother's third time in the hospital, they took me away from my family and put me in a halfway house for kids until they could find a proper foster family. It was a relief and traumatizing."

Despite being placed with foster families, Rochon's situation didn't improve: "It sucked," she says bluntly. "I was sleeping on soaking wet mattresses in the basement with these families who were just taking money; I never felt like I had anything. I kept running away, but I'd be caught." When Rochon was about 12 and back in the halfway house, another girl staying there attempted suicide. Taking advantage of the chaos that generated, Rochon fled and spent her first night on the street. "I slept under a lot of bridges the first couple of months," she says. She soon made friends with another young runaway, a gay boy whose parents had turned their back on him because of his lifestyle. "His family did not want him; they didn't care that he was 14 and living with this older guy. The guy said I could sleep on the floor of the living room, so I had a place. He was vital in saving me in the early days.

"Then, I made friends with a lot of transvestites and drag queens…and also hustlers and street people like that," she continues. "I would make money sort of doing drug runs for them. I really didn't know what I was doing; it was just ‘Take this over here.' I knew it wasn't good, but I wasn't this drug-dealer person. I was just making 20 or 30 bucks for something to eat." That wasn't Rochon's only brush with danger: "One night, a couple of pimps came up from Seattle, trying to round up girls to come and work for them. A couple of the girls were so dense, in an innocent way, and believed all the promises of furs, and this and that. But I saw right through them, even at that age. I probably didn't know the half of it, but I knew how bad they were. Well, I was completely cut up. This scar here [pointing to her right upper arm] was worked on a couple times to make it straight, as opposed to having grafts all over. I have scars all over my body. They completely knifed me up that night. They weren't kidding around. I stood up and didn't do what they told me."

As if that weren't enough, a couple months after this incident, Rochon was robbed and beaten over the head with a crowbar. "The opening was so big, and I lost so much blood," she says. "I went to the hospital and said I fell down the stairs. After they sewed me up, I took off and crashed at someone's place. There was an elevator in that building, and I couldn't even use it for three months. I'd lost so much blood that by the time I'd hit the bottom, I'd pass out. It took like three months for me to reach the point where I could get out of the building." In addition to her own brushes with death, she lost many friends to street violence, drugs, AIDS and suicide.

But Rochon's childhood wasn't all tragedy: When she was about 14, she was staying with a man named Jamie who was the manager of a famous drag-queen performer named Craig Russell (star of the 1977 cult film OUTRAGEOUS!). "Jamie heard that Paramount was in town looking for movie extras," she recalls. "He was always pushing me to do something and not fall into the depths of dealing drugs and prostitution. He knew I didn't want that for myself. The easy way was not an option for me." Jamie pushed her to try out for a role: "He was like, ‘You'll get cash money!' So I went in, and they took a Polaroid. I was a total punk, but a little dressier because my influences were a lot more drag-queen." The movie turned out to be LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FABULOUS STAINS, a film about a female punk band directed by Lou (UP IN SMOKE) Adler, starring Diane Lane and Laura Dern and featuring members of The Sex Pistols and The Clash. "I worked on that movie for three months; I was one of the main extras," Rochon recalls. "I got $300 cash a week, which was amazing for me."

The technical advisor on the set, artist and punk rock journalist Caroline Coon, "really discovered the Sex Pistols and put them on the map. She ended up taking me under her wing. She felt for me and could see how much I was trying. All the other extras were just there for fun, but this was exhilarating for me. The energy was just, wow, they'd ask me to do something and I'd do it 200 percent, and they saw that. She really took care of me, would buy me dinners afterward, we'd hang out. Of course, there were a lot of drugs going around, Lou Adler was hanging out with all the punk rockers, Paul Simonon from the Clash; it was craaazy. The Ramones would come to town, and we all had backstage passes; it was nuts."

Another way this movie changed Rochon's life was that later, she would end up dating the Sex Pistols' Paul Cook, whom she met on the set of LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. Despite his reputation, Rochon claims he was very quiet and called his mother every day, without fail.

Rochon was bitten hard by the acting bug, as her experiences working on that set were some of the only ones that gave her any positive reinforcement and confidence in herself. Determined to study the craft, she took on three jobs. "At 14, I was smart enough to know that if you're serious about something, you have to study," she says. "And I had only made it to grade seven. I enrolled in a bunch of acting classes. I was doing nothing but working to save money to go to this college for theater. But at the very last minute, when I was about 17 or 18, I took the money I had saved, about $3 or $4,000, and moved to New York instead. I realized, while reading and studying and being involved with a theater company, that all these great teachers like Uta Hagen were all in New York. So I was going to go study with them. It's so freeing not to be held back by logic; thank God you have none when you're young! In New York, I studied and belonged to five theater companies. I did dozens of theater projects. I sucked royally, really sucked hard. But I also studied really hard." After her immersion in the Manhattan stage scene came a string of tiny indie-film roles. "I did a couple of T&A comedies, but I did not do any nudity yet," she says. "Chuck Vincent, a former porn director turned Cinemax T&A comedy director, was changing with the times. So I was in these Marilyn Chambers movies that were not porno; it was hilarious. I was telling my friends at home, ‘I'm in a Marilyn Chambers movie!' " The first time Rochon was asked to do nude scenes was for another ex-porn director, Roberta (SNUFF) Findlay, for her 1989 film BANNED. "She was screaming on the set, so it was really scary," Rochon recalls. "I was like, ‘Oh no, she's going to scream at me while I'm naked and vulnerable.' But it was fine. It was a closed set, and it was much easier than I expected. Honestly painless.

"I realized at that point, because it was a good role, that I don't condone nudity, but I'm not against it," she notes. "I don't think it's a good or a bad thing, but I do believe, in such a highly competitive market, if you are looking at the work sort of like a blue-collar actor, which I've always called myself…if it means that I have to do nudity for one or two days during these 20-day shoots, and I really want to work, then I'm gonna do it. It has definitely harmed me as much as it's helped, but I don't care. I had to make the choices I had to make. I make no excuses; I make no apologies."

Since then, Rochon has been a full-time working actress, appearing in at least one movie per year and in one year acting in 19. Most of these have been low-budget horror flicks; Rochon has even toiled on mob-run sets, an experience she doesn't remember fondly. Inevitably for a New York genre actress, she has also become associated with the oeuvre of Lloyd Kaufman and his Troma company, appearing in TROMEO AND JULIET, TERROR FIRMER and CITIZEN TOXIE: THE TOXIC AVENGER IV. "I love Lloyd like nobody else," Rochon says. "He's one of my best friends. I've seen all sides to him; we've fought; we've not spoken to each other. But over 15 years, it's like a type of marriage. I adore the man. I can only say that about somebody I have gone through a lot with."

One hazard of laboring on low-budget films is safety—one she has been especially concerned with since September 2002, when the fingers of her right hand were almost completely severed in an on-set accident. She grimaces, remembering: "Everything inside, except for the bone—all the tendons, the nerves, everything was cut by a machete. I can't tell you the movie because of ongoing litigation. I was chopping a fake dead body, and the director did not like how a certain prop looked. There wasn't even a prop master on the set. They asked, ‘Do you want to use this prop, this prop, or this prop?' And I said, ‘Well, whatever you think will be the lightest and most controllable so I don't have to worry about the weight, and I can just really get into acting the scene.' They said, ‘OK, then use the [real] machete.' Now, every film I had ever acted in had been professional people with professional props, and if anything is real, it's filed down. I mean, there isn't even a question.

"So I took this machete, and I started whaling down on this fake body, with all of my might. There was no [finger guard] that separates the handle from the blade. So with the first chop down, my hand slipped…right onto the blade. And it was real; it was not filed down. I realized right away, but didn't feel anything yet. I just saw my hand open up. I said, calmly, ‘I need to get to a hospital as soon as possible.' They have all this on film.

"This is an important, important story, with all these emerging artists and everything," Rochon says. "Number one: You can't be stupid. Props are props. If you have knives, you need to be safe. Equally important, you need to have insurance. They had none. I had to have half a million dollars of operations on this hand so that it wouldn't be completely useless. They have no way of paying the bills for me. I had to declare bankruptcy because of all the bills, and being disabled and unable to work for so long after that. It devastated me financially. To this day, my hand is slightly clawed; it forever will be, and will only get worse. I have constantly growing arthritis in the hand every day. I only didn't lose my fingers because I got really lucky with the doctor."

Another challenge Rochon has survived recently is a struggle with a brain tumor. It put her through bad headaches, deteriorating eyesight and some substantial weight gain. After three years of misdiagnoses, due to her doctor assuming her symptoms were related to the trauma of her hand injury, she finally got the medication she needed. "Since I was completely financially devastated, I had to take work," she explains. "In a perfect world, I would have gone off, gotten better, looked better and then appeared in film again. But no, there are a number of movies during this period where I am much heavier. To me it's like, big deal, I'm a human being. But people judge and they don't know why. It was the most difficult journey of all the journeys I've ever had, and I've had a lot.

"I've experienced a lot of amazing things in my life, but it's not as though I didn't have to pay for them first. Everybody has their thing in life…for me, I usually have to suffer a whole lot and then I get something. One of the wonderful things that has come into my life is the [Fango] radio show. Since 1994, off and on, I've been involved with radio. I've done a lot of producing at two different stations prior to this." Rochon cohosts with Twisted Sister's Dee Snider, and also produces the show with Mike Kostel. FANGORIA RADIO is broadcast live on Sirius channel 102 on Fridays from 10 p.m.- 1 a.m.

The Sirius radio studio is in the McGraw-Hill building in New York City, right near Radio City Music Hall. It's a bustling operation, with a plush lobby and large wall covered with celebrity autographs from the likes of GWAR, Fear Factory and Danzig. Howard Stern's wing is one way, and the Maxim radio show is being taped down the other hall. The night Fango visits the studio, Snider and Rochon are at the studio more than three hours before the program is due to begin, going over their plan for the night and making sure everything runs smoothly.

Snider is casual and friendly, but obviously the cock of the walk, and everyone defers to him. He does not remove his dark glasses. Rochon is gregarious and friendly, but focused on the show, in professional mode. FANGORIA RADIO is broadcast from within the "fishbowl," the glassed-in area in which they sit, surrounded by cameras and some of the dozen or so crewmembers. Snider is happy with himself for coming up for a new tagline for the show that evening: "FANGORIA RADIO—You don't have to be a geek to listen, but it f**kin' helps." They talk to various genre-film guests throughout the show, have a young grindcore band on to play and run trivia contests. The prize for the first question is a DVD of one of Rochon's movies, HELLBLOCK 13. The phone rings off the hook.

Snider tells Fango, "Debbie impressed me in the first few moments we spoke as being someone who had something to say and was more than just a pretty face, a great rack and a good scream." Rochon returns the praise: "To click with him is a very special thing, but it's rare. It's rarer than you think in radio. It looks easy, but that's part of the secret: to make it seem easy. I just respect him and love him. Don't know him well enough to love him like Lloyd, but maybe someday. But he has had my back, and coming from the street, I always appreciate that."

Snider concurs, "There is definitely a genuine connection between me and her. I like that she gets me and I get her. She's got a great laugh and we make each other laugh. And I recently saw AMERICAN NIGHTMARE [in which Rochon plays a deranged murderess]. I was really impressed with her commitment to the role; she's kind of a Method actor. Of course there was that awkward moment when she takes her top off, and it was like I was seeing my sister's boobs."

Not content to be involved merely in film and radio, Rochon is also a prolific writer, contributing over the years to The Joe Bob Report, Videoscope, Femme Fatales and Sirens of Cinema among others. She has also co-written two books, THE B-MOVIE SURVIVAL GUIDE and ATTACK OF THE B QUEENS.

To paraphrase Nietzsche again, art is the proper task of Rochon's life. She says of acting, "The art of it is what makes me excited. I guess I can say this because I've done it so few times that it has ended up being anything close to art. That's the drive—as opposed to it depleting me and making me bitter, it's the opposite. I long to find it." Recent and upcoming films for Rochon are Justin Wingenfeld's witchcraft/revenge tale SKIN CRAWL; "Jerky Boy" Kamal Ahmed's RAPTURIOUS, about the psychological/supernatural breakdown of a white hip-hopper; CHICAGO MASSACRE: RICHARD SPECK, from ED GEIN: THE BUTCHER OF PLAINFIELD director Michael Feifer; A FEAST OF FLESH, an offbeat vampire movie by Mike Watt and Amy Lynn Best; and Michael (THE WIND) Mongillo's BEING MICHAEL MADSEN, featuring the eponymous actor, his sister Virginia and numerous guest stars. She also writes and produces various projects for FANGORIA TV and hopes to direct her first short in 2007.

Oh, and for any filmmakers reading this: Rochon would also love to be in a Sasquatch movie.

****All non-film images provided by "Gary Cook Image Group".****