Freaks [PG]

In a carnival sideshow is a ‘freak’ with a rather interesting story. As women scream at the ‘monstrosity’ the carnival barker tells the story of how she was once a beautiful, normal trapeze artist who was loved by a midget. When she discovered that the midget, Hans, had inherited a fortune she and her lover, Hercules the Strong Man, devise a plot to get the money, which involves her marrying Hans and then poisoning him. But the plan was foiled when the ‘freaks’ of the carnival rallied together to exact a brutal revenge. 

Upon its release, Freaks was viewed as everything from horror, to art cinema, to documentary, yet despite the various angles of critique this movie has earned over the years, it’s still a movie that many people have never heard of and thus it remains completely underrated. This is a real shame because this movie really does deserve a revisitation and have modern viewers take the punt and have a look at it! A story of revenge, community, and injustice, Tod Browning’s Freaks is a film that’ll really stay with you and is an important part of cinematic history for a number of reasons. 

In a carnival sideshow is a ‘freak’ with a rather interesting story. As women scream at the ‘monstrosity’ the carnival barker tells the story of how she was once a beautiful, normal trapeze artist who was loved by a midget. When she discovered that the midget, Hans, had inherited a fortune she and her lover, Hercules the Strong Man, devise a plot to get the money, which involves her marrying Hans and then poisoning him. But the plan was foiled when the ‘freaks’ of the carnival rallied together to exact a brutal revenge. 

As I mentioned, this movie is an important one for a number of reasons. The first being that its cast was made up of a collection of actual malformed or disfigured people or carnival ‘freaks’, which is what prompted a lot of people to view this movie as a sort of documentary. Each of them deliver a great performance, wonderfully establishing this great sense of community and togetherness, but also cult, which is what brings a level of horror to the film: during the climactic wedding feast scene, the feast turns into a sort of initiation ritual with the ‘freaks’ accepting Cleopatra, the trapeze artist, as one of them. Needless to say the scene does not end well. 

The plot is something that was very different and unseen back in the 30s and to be honest it still holds a lot of power to this day. Whilst on the one hand it’s a film defending the disfigured and disabled, depicting them as people too with just as much sense of community, equality, and justice as anyone else, but on the other hand it’s set against a carnival backdrop that has conflicting connotations of both community and cheap, schadenfreude entertainment and it depicts the community of the disabled going from the victims to the vindicators: the climactic reveal of the revenge upon Cleopatra is actually quite violent and frightening (even though she was a pretty evil character)! 

Starring Wallace Ford, Lella Hyams, Olga Baclanova, Roscoe Ates, Henry Victor, Harry Earles, Daisy Earles, Rose Dione, Daisy Hilton, Violet Hilton, Schlitze, Josephine Joseph, Johnny Eck, Frances O’Connor, and Peter Robinson, Freaks is an important film in cinematic history that, when watched once, will leave its mark on you despite the fact that it’s so underrated. Filled with romance, betrayal, mockery, drama, comedy, and horrific revenge, it’s a film that I was quite intrigued by and I would definitely say that I enjoyed it!