Trash Humpers is a 2009 American independent drama film directed by Harmony Korine. Shot on worn VHS home video, the film features a "loser-gang cult-freak collective" and their whereabouts in Nashville, Tennessee.

Walking his dog late at night in the back alleys of his hometown of Nashville, Korine encountered trash bins strewn across the ground in what he imagined as a war zone. Overhead lights beamed down upon the trash in a Broadway-style that Korine found very dramatic. They began to resemble human form, beaten, abused and “very humpable.” Korine remembered, as a teenager growing up in Nashville, a group of elderly peeping toms who would come out at night. He has described them as "the neighborhood boogeymen who worked at Krispy Kreme and would wrap themselves in shrubbery, cover themselves with dirt, and peep through the windows of other neighbors." Putting these two ideas together, Korine found conception for the film.

As a child of the 1980s, Korine grew in the age of VHS. He remembers his first camera, given to him by his father, and reusing the tape over and over again. “There was something interesting about certain images or scenes bubbling up to the surface.” On the rationale for using VHS as the medium for Trash Humpers, Korine stated “There’s this obsession nowadays with technology and the fact that everything looks so clear. Everything needs to be so high-definition. There was a strange beauty in the analog. You almost have to squint to see things through the grain and the mist. There’s something sinister about it.”

Harmony Korine (born January 4, 1973) is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and author.

He is best known for writing Kids, and for directing Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy and Mister Lonely. His film Trash Humpers premiered at Toronto International Film Festival and won the main prize, the DOX Award, at CPH:DOX in November 2009. As of March 2012, Korine's project Spring Breakers was under production in Florida.

Korine was born in Bolinas, California to Eve and Sol Korine and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. Sol produced documentaries for PBS in the 1970s about an "array of colourful Southern characters" and taught Korine how to use a Bolex camera. As a child, Korine watched movies with his father, who rented Buster Keaton films and took him to see Even Dwarfs Started Small in the theater. Korine reminisces, "I knew there was a poetry in cinema that I had never seen before that was so powerful." Korine spent his childhood in Nashville, attending Hillsboro High School before moving to New York City to live with his grandmother. Korine also spent some time living with his parents in a commune, which helped to inspire the commune setting of Mister Lonely. As a teenager, Korine frequented revival theaters, watching classic films by John Cassavetes, Werner Herzog, Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Alan Clarke. In an interview with Bruce LaBruce, Korine briefly mentioned that he studied Business Administration in college. Other sources state that he studied Dramatic Writing at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University for one semester before dropping out to pursue a career as a professional skateboarder.