Freaks (also re-released as The Monster Story, Forbidden Love, and Nature's Mistakes) is a 1932 American pre-Code drama horror film produced and directed by Tod Browning, starring Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova, and Roscoe Ates.
Freaks, originally intended as a vehicle for Lon Chaney, is set amongst the backdrop of a travelling French circus and follows a conniving trapeze artist who joins a group of carnival sideshow performers with a plan to seduce and murder a dwarf in the troupe to gain his inheritance. However, her plot proves to have dangerous consequences. The film is based on elements from the short story "Spurs" by Tod Robbins, first published in Munsey's Magazine in February 1923, with the rights being purchased by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Cedric Gibbons, a childhood friend of Robbins and MGM art department chief, was responsible for the purchase.
Filmed in Los Angeles in the fall of 1931, some employees at MGM were discomfited by the presence of the actors portraying the "freaks" on set, and, other than the so-called more normal looking "freaks", the conjoined twins and the Earles, the performers were not allowed to be on the studio lot, relegated instead to a specially-built tent. The film had test screenings in January 1932, with many members of the audience reacting negatively, finding the film too grotesque. In response to this, MGM executive Irving Thalberg, without consent of director Browning, edited the original 90-minute feature, which was significantly cut, with additional alternate footage incorporated to help increase the running time. The final abridged cut of the film, released in February 1932, was 64 minutes; the original version no longer exists.
Freaks made its world premiere at the Fox Theatre in San Diego, shown in full, without the subsequent cuts from January 28 and had a successful run. The theatre advertised the fact that it was the only place where the movie could be seen in the "original uncensored version".
Despite the cuts made to the film, Freaks still garnered notice for the portrayal of its eponymous characters by people who worked as sideshow performers and had real disabilities. These cast members included dwarf siblings Harry and Daisy Earles; Johnny Eck, who had sacral agenesis; the conjoined twin sisters Daisy and Violet Hilton; and Schlitzie, a man with microcephaly. Because of its controversial content, the film was banned in the United Kingdom for over 30 years, and was labelled as "brutal and grotesque" in Canada.
Though it received critical backlash and was a box-office failure upon initial release, Freaks was subject to public and critical reappraisal in the 1960s, as a long forgotten Hollywood classic, particularly in Europe, and was screened at the 1962 Venice Film Festival. In retrospect, numerous film critics have suggested that the film presents a starkly sympathetic portrait of its sideshow characters rather than an exploitative one, with Andrew Sarris declaring Freaks one of the "most compassionate" films ever made. Nonetheless, critics have continued to take note of the film's horror elements; in 2009, Joe Morgenstern proclaimed that Freaks contains some of the most terrifying scenes in film history. Film scholars have interpreted the film as a metaphor for class conflict, reflecting the Great Depression, and it has been studied for its portrayal of people with disabilities, with theorists arguing that it presents an anti-eugenics message. The film has been highly influential, has become a cult classic, and, in 1994, was selected for preservation by the United States National Film Registry, which seeks to preserve films that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Plot A beautiful and conniving trapeze artist named Cleopatra seduces a carnival sideshow dwarf named Hans after learning of his large inheritance. This is much to the chagrin of Frieda, his fiancée, also a dwarf. Cleopatra also conspires with circus strongman Hercules to kill Hans so she will inherit his wealth. Meanwhile, other romances flourish among the sideshow performers: the Bearded Lady, who is in love with the Human Skeleton, gives birth to their daughter. The news is spread among the friends by the Stork Woman. Additionally, Violet, a conjoined twin whose sister Daisy is married to Roscoe, the stuttering circus clown, becomes engaged to the circus's owner.
Hans, enamored with Cleopatra, ultimately marries her. At their wedding Cleopatra begins poisoning Hans's wine but drunkenly kisses Hercules in front of Hans, revealing her affair, as the other entertainers are busy celebrating. Dwarf Angeleno leads the "freaks" in an initiation ceremony for Cleopatra, to Hercules's amusement. When he offers her the ceremonial wine cup, Cleopatra refuses it in disgust and drives them away, then berates Hans and drunkenly parades him around on her shoulders like a child. Hans realizes that he has been played for a fool and rejects Cleopatra's attempts to apologize, but then he falls ill from the poison. While bedridden, Hans apologizes to Cleopatra and appears to take the poisoned medicine that she is giving him, but secretly plots with the other entertainers.
In the film's climax, Hans confronts Cleopatra with three of the entertainers as backup thugs. However, Hans's circus wagon is overturned in a storm, giving Cleopatra the chance to escape into the forest, closely pursued by them. At the same time, Hercules goes to kill sea lion trainer Venus for knowing about the plot. Venus's boyfriend, Phroso the clown, attempts to stop Hercules but is nearly killed before the rest of them intervene and injure Hercules, saving Phroso. They all pursue an injured Hercules.
The freaks capture Cleopatra. Some time later, she performs at a carnival as a grotesque "human duck", with her legs cut off and one eye gouged out. In the original version of the film, Hercules also appears afterward as a castrato singer.
While some versions end on Cleopatra as the human duck, another ending shows Hans, now living in a mansion from his inheritance and still humiliated, visited by Phroso, Venus and Frieda. Frieda tells Hans she knows he just wanted to demand the bottle of poison from Cleopatra, not to mutilate her, and not to blame himself for what happened; and that she still loves him. The two then share a heartwarming hug.
Cast
Analysis and themes Class conflict Film critic Melvin Matthews has interpreted Freaks within the context of the Great Depression, writing that it "is essentially a story of the little people (average Americans) versus the big people (the rich and businessmen). The film makes it clear that the big people, personified by Cleopatra and Hercules, scorn the Freaks. Such a disdainful attitude was reflected in the real-life social outlook of some business tycoons during the Depression." Film studies academic Jennifer Peterson similarly identifies Freaks as an example of an "outsider film". Historian Jane Nicholas suggests that the film's conclusion, in which the circus performers mutilate Cleopatra whilst chanting "one of us", is reinforcing the freaks' social currency: "It is interesting that a statement that reads as one of inclusion is often cited as one that embodies horror in the film. What does it mean to be 'one of us'? The chilling horror of the chant 'one of us' reveals why the freak show persists."
In the book Midnight Movies (1991), critics J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum compare Freaks to Gold Diggers of 1933, writing that the former is "almost literally dealing with the same thing [class disparity]...but more directly—because the end product isn't just putting on a show, but slaves breaking their chains and triumphing over their masters. Freaks is asking a Depression audience to identify not with the Beautiful People, but with sideshow mutations, a total underclass."
John Stanley, longtime publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle, describes the film as "A Classic of the Grotesque" in Creature Features.
Disability and eugenics
The film's depiction of people with disabilities has been a significant point of analysis amongst film critics and scholars. In his book Subversive Horror Cinema: Countercultural Messages of Films from Frankenstein to the Present (2014), critic Jon Towlson proposes that Freaks exemplifies an anti-eugenics sentiment. In presenting this idea, Towlson cites vignette sequences that make up the beginning of the film, largely consisting of the freaks in the context of their sideshow, before Browning "begins to undercut the voyeuristic aspects of the traditional freakshow by showing the freaks engaged in the activities of everyday life, dispelling the initial shock and revulsion, and encouraging the viewer to see the freaks as individuals who have overcome their disabilities."
Towlson also notes that the freaks' everyday interactions with the able-bodied sideshow performers, such as Phroso, Roscoe, and Venus, who treat the freaks as equals and friends, further blurs the distinction between the able-bodied and disabled members of the circus, and that the physically beautiful characters—such as trapeze artist Cleopatra—are the ones who are vindictive, supremacist, and immoral. He further argues that the implied sexuality in the film—such as the implication that the conjoined twin sisters (played by Daisy and Violet Hilton) carry on their own separate sex lives—is an affront to the eugenic stance against reproduction and sexual activity among the "physically unfit." Towlson ultimately concludes that this subversion of character exemplifies a stark opposition to the core belief of eugenics, which is that physical appearance is equated with internal worth.
Angela Smith, a scholar of film and disability, similarly notes that Freaks presents numerous scenes in which the freaks engage in routine and ordinary domestic behavior. Among them, Smith cites the freaks' celebration of the birth of the Bearded Lady's baby, and the film's key dinner party sequence in which Cleopatra grows enraged when the freaks sing "We accept her, we accept her, one of us, one of us" as a welcoming song. Film scholars Martin Norden and Madeleine Cahill, however, question Browning's intention of the film's final revenge sequence, in which the freaks mutilate the able-bodied, morally cruel Cleopatra. "The implications of the violence against [Cleopatra] are far from clear," they write. "Members of a traditionally disempowered minority use their collective force to disempower a majority member—turn her into one of them, in effect—leading us to wonder if she is truly disempowered or empowered in a new way. Browning's ambiguity on this point only enhances the film's unsettling properties."
Status as a horror film Some critics, such as John Thomas and Raymond Durgnat, have noted that Freaks does not fully embody the genre. Thomas wrote in Film Quarterly that Freaks would "disappoint no one but the mindless children who consume most horror films.... Certainly it is macabre.... But the point is that Freaks is not really a horror film at all, though it contains some horrifying sequences." Durgnat made a similar observation, writing that, like the films of Luis Buñuel, its shock value "mingles with moments which seem shallow, but by the end of the film one begins to catch their mood, a calm, cold combination of guignol and eerily matter-of-fact."