FREAKS

The Undisputed Masterpiece of Circus Cinema

This infamous and controversial motion picture was immediately banned worldwide when it was produced in 1932. Twenty years later the ban was finally lifted and Tod Browning's sympathetic and affecting portrayal of the misshapen inhabitants of a traveling carnival became an immediate cult-horror classic. In 1994, FREAKS was honored by being selected for inclusion in the highly prestigious National Film Registry's Archive of Cinematic Treasures. And, most recently, Warner Brothers introduced a DVD version containing many interesting and informative special features— further proof of this motion picture's enduring merit and well-deserved place among the silver screen's most memorable efforts.

During the 1920's, Browning was best known for his highly successful collaboration with Lon Chaney, Sr., perhaps the greatest of all character actors and one of the biggest stars of the silent screen. Beginning with OUTSIDE THE LAW (1921), the team of Browning and Chaney produced a number of exceptional films, two of which helped shape Browning's production of FREAKS.

In THE UNKNOWN (1927), Chaney plays an armless knife-thrower (yes, you read that correctly) who falls in love with another performer at his circus, a Gypsy horse rider (none other than the beautiful Joan Crawford in one of her earliest films) who despises being touched. A year later, in WEST OF ZANZIBAR, Chaney is seen as a crippled magician in a jungle village who plots revenge against the man who caused his injuries. When “the man of a thousand faces” died in 1930, many in Hollywood believed that without his “meal ticket”, Browning's career was at an end.

Browning himself admitted the loss of his best friend nearly caused him to retire. Then he ran across Tod Robbins' “Spurs” (what's with these guys having only one “d”?), and he immediately knew what his next project would be.

Browning realized that a carnival was one of the few remaining strongholds of rugged individualism in post-Depression America. Unlike the “outside” world of rubes and marks where conformity is the norm (and even preferred), with carnies it is one's individuality, one's differences and deviances which are valued the most. That's why “freaks” are respected and can have enormous economic value (many earned far more than the sword swallower, for example), not only for the carnival owner, but for themselves as well. Browning also admired the code of the freaks: “the hurt of one is the hurt of us all.”

On the surface FREAKS is a simple story of a carnival midget who falls in love with a statuesque trapeze artist and nearly becomes her victim as she attempts to poison him for his money. Incensed by her betrayal, the fraternity of freaks exacts its revenge. But there's more, much more.

In FREAKS Browning does the impossible. Viewers initially identify with the beautiful trapeze artist and her strongman lover. After all, they look like we do and we physically relate to them both. However, ever so slowly Browning gets his audience to slowly appreciate, identify with and actually love the collection of pinheads, human torsos, Siamese twins, dwarfs and a wide array of other mutilated “monsters from birth.” For example, by the time one of the pinhead sisters receives a new dress for her birthday, there usually isn't a dry eye in the house. And be prepared to marvel at the human torso's unassisted lighting of his cigarette. This is a powerful scene of remarkable self-reliance that will linger with the audience long after the closing credits because there, but for the grace of God and the genes, crawl we.