Freaks

Freaks

For his legendary Freaks, Tod Browning drew inspiration from his own life experiences. At the age of 16, he ran away from a deeply unhappy life with his family to join a traveling circus that toured the entire country, working as a clown and vaudeville performer for 13 years before turning his attention to cinema. The film’s plot weaves through the backstage workings of a traveling circus where most performers have some kind of congenital deformity. Cleopatra, a beautiful acrobat, tries to seduce Hans, a member of the troupe with dwarfism, in order to swipe his large inheritance. Her plans, however, run into many unexpected obstacles. A latent and dark allegory tackling the period of the Great Depression, class prejudice, and racism in the USA, a veritable societal bombshell for the mores of its time (and beyond), a scathing indictment of both the abhorrent theories espoused by eugenics and the deeply-rooted notions we all hold when it comes to what is considered “normal,” Freaks stands – even today, even in its abridged form given that the original 90-minute cut has been lost forever – as a monument to daring and originality, as a hymn to deviating from stifling norms, but above all as one of the most sui generis horror films ever made.
Screening Schedule

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Direction: Tod Browning
Script: Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon
Cinematography: Merritt B. Gerstad
Editing: Basil Wrangell
Actors: Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova, Roscoe Ates, Henry Victor, Harry Earles, Daisy Earles, Rose Dione, Daisy Hilton, Violet Hilton, Schlitze Surtees, Josephine Joseph, Prince Randian,Olga Roderick, Frances O’Connor, Martha Morris, Elvira Snow, Jenny Lee Snow, Angelo Rossitto, Edward Brophy, Matt McHugh, Johnny Eck, Peter Robinson, Elizabeth Green, Minnie Woolsey, Albert Conti, Michael Visaroff, Murray Kinnell, Hooper Atchley, Jerry Austin, Mathilde Comont, Ernie S. Adams, Edith, Delmo Fri
Production: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Producers: Irving Thalberg
Format: DCP
Color: B/W
Production Country: USA
Production Year: 1932
Duration: 62'
Contact: Park Circus
Awards/Distinctions: National Film Registry – National Film Preservation Board 1994, Motion Picture – OFTA 2020

Tod Browning

Tod Browning (1880 - 1962) ranks among the most original and enigmatic filmmakers of his time. Born Charles Albert Browning, Jr. into a middle-class family, he ran away from his Kentucky home at age 16 to join the circus, where he took on roles as a barker, a contortionist, a clown, and a somnambulist buried alive in a box with its own ventilation system. Following a stint in vaudeville and adopting the moniker Tod (German for "death"), Browning eventually found a home in cinema as an actor until a life-altering car accident placed him behind the camera. He went on to direct a series of underworld melodramas, including nine films starring Priscilla Dean (Outside the Law and Drifting), before creating some of the most bizarre and eerily atmospheric films of the silent era with Lon Chaney, in a 10-film collaboration that includes The Unknown, widely considered Browning's masterpiece. Chaney's death in 1930 coincided with the director's transition to sound, notably with his genre-defining version of Dracula starring Bela Lugosi and his transgressive, career-tarnishing Freaks, later reappraised by Andrew Sarris as "one of the most compassionate films ever made". Browning has been described as one of cinema's thorniest humanists as well as "the first diabolist of the cinema", whose influence can be seen in the work of David Lynch, John Waters, Guillermo del Toro, and David Cronenberg. Though his films retain complex moral ambiguities, a glance at this transgressive body of work reveals a visionary with an eye for stylization and memorable performances from both Hollywood stars and non-professional actors. His groundbreaking achievements in horror and underworld melodramas were typified by incisive manifestations of beauty, alongside lifelong personal obsessions with the sideshow milieu, criminality and retribution, and psychosexual innuendo.

Filmography

1915 The Lucky Transfer (short)
1917 The Jury of Fate
1918 The Legion of Death
1920 Outside the Law
1925 The Unholy Three
1926 The Blackbird
1927 The Show
1929 Where East Is East
1931 Dracula
1932 Freaks
1935 Mark of the Vampire
1939 Miracles for Sale