This is an audio-only film essay about Freaks (1932). My husband challenged me to do this monologue style podcast about this, one of his favorite films. Here I do an exploration of how Tod Browning’s anomaly hovers between melodrama and sensationalism. Their intersection might just be art. Scroll down to read, or click below to listen on YouTube.

Tod Browning’s Freaks was not my choice to watch, and I did not want to watch it. And then, against my will, I became enthralled with it. I did not even scroll on my phone or play a video game while we were watching this film.

I was so surprised. I don’t like exploitation movies in general. I don’t like how you’re getting to a point by also exploiting people.

Let me start over.

I did not want to watch Tod Browning’s Freaks last night. It was not my choice, and I tried to hide it, but it was very obvious to my husband that I did not want to watch it. But I gave it the old college try, as they say, and I did not scroll on my phone or play a video game while we were watching it.

I eventually became very caught up in particularly the melodrama aspect of the film, as if I was supposed to be taking it seriously. And maybe I was. I would like to read a little bit about why Freaks is considered culturally significant, but I guess I’ll get to a synopsis first, in case you haven’t seen it.

This was the 1932 film. Tod Browning also directed Dracula, but I think that Freaks might have hurt his career. They are notable for having used actual people with disabilities who worked in the circus at the time as actors, as well as regular-sized, non-typical people as actors.

There’s a long prologue text scroll at the beginning that explains how, throughout history, people with deformities, born with deformities, and disabilities were cast out of society in infancy and were considered bad luck or a curse. And then it goes on to empower the actors here in the film, while also exploiting them.

The Story of Freaks

This is the story of a beautiful woman. They said beautiful. Her actions made her ugly.

And all the women in the film look the same and had the same hairstyle, very much the bleached-blonde finger-wave bob. It was hard to tell people apart, but the main antagonist was named Cleopatra. She was the peacock of the air. She was a trapeze artist.

There was a small person named Hans who was in love with her, but he was already engaged to another small person named Frieda.

So it’s well known that Hans has some money, but not how much. And the peacock of the air, Cleopatra, and her boyfriend, the strongman—I think they were calling him Hercules—began to prey on Hans. And it ends with them getting married, Hans and Cleopatra, only for her to try to steal his money.

And then the rest of the—do I have to call them disabled circus performers for the whole duration of this? I’m going to call them freaks. You’re going to assume that that’s in quotation marks, because I certainly wouldn’t use a term like that in day-to-day life.

But that’s a group of people there within the context of the film. They’re a family, which is quite touching. Genuinely touching, to watch them interact with one another.

And they have a mantra: “One of us, one of us, one of us.”

And so they take revenge in gruesome fashion upon Cleopatra for trying to bilk Hans, and they come after her in the terrifying scene. Not only is it terrifying because they wait for this carnival that they’re in to move between cities, and it’s raining, and there’s mud, and they’re riding in circus wagons that I think are being pulled by horses. All of that—wagons, mud, rain, dark—would be horrific enough for me. I don’t like to travel, and I don’t like to get dirty, and I’m afraid of rain.

But, as is fitting, I suppose, I have a problem with revenge pictures because they always show someone being exploited, and it’s the audience’s preference to look at the people being exploited. And then say that they’re only there for the revenge.

But this revenge is pretty good.

The man with no arms and no legs, and a man with only arms and no legs, and various others in the friend group come after this woman. And we don’t see how they do it, but they turn her into a chicken lady, not even a peacock. And you’ve all probably seen the famous reveal at the end.

This movie is bookended by someone being told a story at the beginning, but not shown this woman who used to be a beautiful woman, they say, and is now on display. And then you’re waiting for the shot of her at the end.

But what is unsatisfying about this?

And I did enjoy the melodrama aspect. I enjoyed the young lady Frieda trying to talk Hans out of his foolishness and trying to appeal to the other woman. “Cleopatra, please don’t take my man.”

And I got into that. I got feelings, because I’m a melodrama type of gal.

But this whole film is a series of vignettes, where the typical actors tell sort of vaudeville jokes, and I couldn’t understand a lot of the jokes or the punchlines because of the bad sound and the 1930s slang.

And then the parts with the disabled circus performers were just showcasing, like the guy with no arms and no legs, holding a cigarette and a box of matches in his mouth and lighting the match with his mouth and then lighting his cigarette.

And now, this guy, despite his disability, looks like somebody that you wouldn’t want to mess with.

He has an earring. He looks like a swashbuckler. And when he comes after Cleopatra at the end, holding just a knife in his mouth, after you’ve seen him light the cigarette, you might believe that he’s going to effectively carve her up with just his mouth. So maybe he’s a bad example.

He looked like a swashbuckler. He did have, evidently, in real life, both the swash and the buckle, because he had six children. But maybe more appropriate—

There are people that have some type of encephalo problem. Encephalitis—it’s not -itis, it’s the opposite—that they call them pinheads. There are several of those. They’re hanging out in the woods, along with a motherly figure to them, and they’re kind of frolicking. And there’s the guy who’s just a torso and arms.

And there’s no purpose to this scene other than to sort of—I think they’re unspecified Europe.

These two noble guys come by and say, “What? What are you doing in my woods?” And the lady’s like, “Oh, they’re children. Let them play.” And the two guys immediately relent, and they’re like, “Oh, okay.”

But that was just to show the people looking the way that they look.

And then we get to the end where they get revenge. Not those people, not the pinheads, but the man with just the arms and the man with no arms and no legs. And we’re supposed to think it’s okay that we had a good old stare at them because they caused this evil woman to get her comeuppance.

And initially, I had thought, well, what’s the point of this film? Because I hadn’t seen it before last night. Or maybe he had put it on—my husband loves this movie. He had put it on, but I had not paid attention.

And I thought that Hans was just this typical dickhead who had a lot of money and believed that a woman loved him for some reason after she found out that he had money. Like, it was the greatest luck that that was the same day that she fell in love with him.

Can you believe it?

But the fact that she immediately humiliates his friends and starts trying to poison him, even at the wedding banquet, brought me around.

And I’ll admit to being a sort of cynical person. I don’t like to get caught up in things, or I don’t like to admit that I get caught up in things, when the reality is that I will cry at commercials. And I was very caught up in the story of Frieda losing her man to this horrible peacock.

And I soon began to see at least Frieda as a typical person. I stopped looking at her as a small person.

And maybe that’s the significance of this film.

Why Has Freaks Become Culturally Significant?

I actually wanted to do some research on how Freaks became a significant cultural piece of art. And I’m very excited. I’ll tell you why later.

But I got a JSTOR subscription for free where I can read a hundred articles a month—that is, academic journals that are put online. And so I found this article. It is called “Sleazmania, Eurotrash, and High Art: The Place of European Art Films in American Low Culture,” by Joan Hawkins.

It’s from Film Quarterly, Volume 53, Issue 2, Winter 1999–2000.

Now, that’s when I would have been working in a video store and discussing trash art films with people in a university community as part of my job. So this is significant for me to have found this article.

And she’s trying to make a point of how art films got brought down to the level of American trash films. But I’m also inferring the opposite: How did these trash films get brought up to the level of art?

And Hawkins is saying that it’s all about people needing films to affect them viscerally, and that it’s necessary for those films to be about the body in order for this to take place.

And on page 17, she says:

“Paracinema consumption, as American art cinema consumption, has often been understood as a reaction against the hegemonic and normatizing practices of mainstream dominant Hollywood production.”

So that’s saying that some of these films are denigrated at the time of release, the way that Freaks was, and they later become considered art just because they’re different, because people are looking for something different, and because normal people would have never watched this film.

It’s hard to define art.

I’d like to read something else. I’m stalling because I’m scrolling through, and I’d like to read a longer passage of what she wrote in order to put Freaks in context. This is from page 24 of Film Quarterly.

Initially made as a mainstream horror film at MGM, the film caused a scandal, described in reviews as loathsome and unwholesome. The film was pulled from mainstream distribution shortly after its initial release and leased to Dwain Esper, the prolific exploitation filmmaker, who showed it under a variety of titles on the exploitation circuit, like Daughters of Darkness. However, the film had trouble finding an appropriate audience: too sensational for mainstream filmgoers, the film simply wasn’t sensational enough for many exploitation fans.

As David Friedman notes, Freaks nearly caused a riot when Dwain Esper showed it to a North Carolina drive-in audience under the sensational title Forbidden Love. Led by the title and advertising to expect a soft-core treatment of love between a beautiful woman and a midget, the crowd had no patience with a movie which Raymond Durgnat later compared to the European art films of Buñuel. Esper managed to pacify the drive-in patrons by showing them a black-and-white nudist colony one-reeler that he had tucked in the trunk of his car, a film that apparently came much closer to satisfying their expectations than did Browning’s creepy classic.

Interestingly enough, Freaks was revived thirty years later as an art film and did very well, attracting favorable reviews by Raymond Durgnat and John Thomas and captivating such noble patrons as Emile de Antonio and Diane Arbus. By 1967, David J. Skal notes, the film had made it to the Museum of Modern Art.

So why do I, Tell Me A Movie, believe that Freaks has become culturally significant?

What makes Freaks particularly interesting in this context is that its very appeal as an exploitation film—its presentation of bodies that mainstream audiences found disturbing—eventually became part of what made it worthy of serious artistic consideration.

I think, and I’m not going to go and do more research at this point to back this up with the text, because I’m over sixteen minutes into this review, I think that disability in film is meant to represent ability.

I think often disabled characters are depicted for their strength, and I think it is a classic example of irony.

I know that people love irony. They love to teach us irony in school. And yet, still, nobody knows what it means.

I remember we were having to read terrible, just disturbing short stories as early as the ninth grade, and there was one that really messed me up. It was Edgar Allan Poe’s “Hop-Frog.”

And there was a guy—I guess he had spina bifida—and he moved more on his hands than his legs, which were kind of atrophied, and was mocked and called Hop-Frog and was kept around as sort of a court jester. And at the end, he gets his revenge on the people who had mocked him.

And this is irony.

And excuse me, let me take a drink.

And he tricks all these highfalutin men into dressing up as apes, I believe, for a party. It’s been thirty-five years since I read this, but it did have an impression on me.

They’re all wearing fur on themselves with tar and somehow become chained to the chandeliers, and he pulls them up and they burn to death in front of everyone.

And that’s not—well, maybe you could say Edgar Allan Poe was exploitation, but I think, no, he was considered art right away. And that is irony, because you expect the disabled person to come out on the bottom, but they come out on top. And they almost always come out on top in art when they are used as a literary device.

And in this case, Hans keeps—realizes what the peacock is doing to him and gets his friends to come and make her into a monstrosity, while pretending to still go along with her version of the marriage.

So, irony. That’s why this film is considered culturally significant.

Now, I had originally thought that I would get into some other films that used actual people that were circus performers, and even a TV show, because I didn’t expect to like this movie as much as I did. But I’m coming to about twenty minutes here, and so I’m gonna end this up.

If you like Freaks, too, then you’re one of us, one of us, one of us. And I’m one of you.

And I’ll say à tout à l’heure until next time.

Citations: excerpt read from “Sleaze Mania, Euro-Trash, and High Art: The Place of European Art Films in American Low Culture” Joan Hawkins Film Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Winter, 1999-2000), pp. 14-29 (16 pages)