Halloween Horrors: FREAKS

FREAKS  (1932)
Directed by Tod Browning
Starring Harry Earles, Daisy Earles, Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova, Henry Victor, Angelo Rossitto, Rose Dione, Roscoe Ates
Not Rated (contains PG-13-level unsettling/disturbing thematic elements and some violence).
SCAREmeter: 7/10
GOREmeter: 4.5/10 
OVERALL: 4 out of 4 stars

After making the iconic 1931 adaptation DRACULA, director Tod Browning made another horror film.  Despite being well lesser known, FREAKS has had a much more tumultuous history as one of the most controversial movies ever, having been whittled down to an abnormally short 62-minute running time from the original 90-minute cut that one woman alleged caused her to have a miscarriage, and even then been banned in the United Kingdom for 30 years and mostly unseen by the American public for almost two decades when it was rendered "obscene" under the restrictive Production Code, enforced from 1934 until 1968 and adhered to by the major studios and theaters chains.  It is also a more frightening, more layered and much better film than DRACULA, even if it is quite apparently incomplete, with the removed footage now "lost" and a sweet but out of place final scene meant to temper the film's dark conclusion.
Very loosely adapted from a short story called Spurs, FREAKS takes place within the weird world of the Rollo Bros. Traveling Circus.  Hans (Harry Earles) is a German little person in the circus' freak show, engaged to demure fellow little person, Frieda (Daisy Earles), but distracted from that relationship by the alluring but manipulative and cold-hearted acrobat, Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova).  Hans is very wealthy thanks to his inheritance, and Cleopatra seizes upon his naive infatuation as a way to milk extravagant gifts from him, pretending to requite his romantic interest, while in fact having an affair with the brutish strong man, Hercules (Henry Victor), with whom she ridicules little Hans' passions.  It is said the "freaks," within their tight-knit tribal community, have a code of their own which they hold to fiercely.  Offend one of them, and they have all been offended, and under the daily persecution they face, there are certain offenses that are not punished lightly.

Prince Randian aka "The Living Torso"

Part of the controversy to the film was that Browning chose to cast real-life circus freaks in the movie, something the shocked and disgusted more conservative audiences in its day, but offers a fascinating look now at the lives of these "sideshow freaks" of yesteryear.  Prince Randian, stage-named "The Human Torso," born without any limbs, takes a match out from the box and lights his cigarette (in deleted footage, he even rolled the cigarette first!); Johnny Eck, "The Half-Boy," born without legs or a lower torso, runs around and performs everyday tasks on his hands; and Joseph Josephine, a reputed (but never proven nor disproven) hermaphrodite, with one profile made up like a man and the other like a beautiful woman, struggles to find love.  The film is highly sympathetic to the "freaks," and while often showing the cruelty that many people display towards them, as in the case of Cleopatra and Hercules, there are also kinder, more tolerant circus performers like Phroso the clown (Wallace Ford) and his beautiful girlfriend Venus (Leila Hyams), who socialize and sympathize with the freaks.  Granted, the title and other terminology are dated, but also reflect a time period (hence, dated), and while the freaks ultimately unleash a truly horrific vengeance on those who have humiliated and maligned them (something of a non-spoiler because the footage was deleted and now lost, Hercules is castrated and sings falsetto in the original epilogue), it not in question that the "beautiful people," Cleopatra and Hercules are the true monsters.
The lives of the freaks are often ordinary and their natural personalities are kind and sweet.  They are shown celebrating the birth of the bearded lady's (Olga Roderick) new daughter, and the father, Peter Robinson, aka "The Human Skeleton" passes around cigars to the circus performers.  Micropheliacs (a neurodevelopmental disorder with an abnormally small head circumference and mental retardation), billed in such shows as "Pinheads," include Elvira and Jenny Lee Snow, stage names "Zip and Pip," and Simon Metz, aka Schlitzie, who make up a sweet-natured, good-humored trio.
Today, FREAKS is much more disconcerting and scary than just about any other horror movie from that time period, in part because coming just before the Production Code Era (the Production Code had been instituted in 1930, but not enforced until 1934) and providing a potent example of just the sort of material the Code was to put a stop to, but also very much as a testament to filmmaking skill and because of the authentic feel it creates by showing the circus performers as they really were.  However, it is clearly incomplete, a victim of panicked censorship on the part of the studio, creating an overly abrupt ending, plot holes, and perhaps most troubling, a poorly-fitted final scene.  After the intensely negative reaction of test audiences, about a third of the film was removed, while one scene was added on; a happy (or rather, happier) resolution.  It's not actually a bad or unsatisfying ending, but it feels utterly out of place in the context of everything the film had just built to, like a coda in not merely a different key, but an entirely different genre of music.

Johnny Eck aka "The Amazing Half Boy"

FREAKS was the subject of extreme controversy and effectively ended the formerly successful career of director Tod Browning, who struggled to find work after that and made his final film seven years later.  As was the case many earlier failures, however, the counterculture of the 1960s saw the reemergence of FREAKS as a cult hit, and what was thought so shocking before was now sympathetic.  Many points of the audiences of the 1930s taking of offense are more offensive by today's politically-correct standards, especially the controversy of the film's use of actual circus performers with real-life deformities, which were considered too horrifying.  Today, FREAKS teeters on the edge of what is historical and what is dehumanizing, but remains on the sympathetic former side of the line.  In 1994, the Library of Congress' National Film Registry selected FREAKS for preservation as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant," six years before Browning's most famous film, DRACULA (1931) would make the cut.  What put it so far beyond the pale in 1932 now lends it an edge that is absent from all but a few film of its era, and where it's been tempered are it's greatest weaknesses now.