Freaks: The 1932 Film That Ended a Career

In 1931 Tod Browning was one of the most bankable directors in Hollywood. He had just made Dracula for Universal, minted Bela Lugosi into an icon, and could more or less write his own ticket. In 1932 he made Freaks for MGM, and by the time the studio had finished mutilating it and the public had finished recoiling from it, his career was effectively over. He directed only a handful of films afterwards and retired into obscurity, a wealthy recluse largely forgotten by the industry he had helped build. Few films have cost their maker so much. Fewer still have been so thoroughly vindicated by the century that followed.

Freaks is a genuinely singular object in American cinema, and its singularity comes from one decision that no studio would sanction today or, frankly, sanctioned then: Browning cast real sideshow performers to play the sideshow performers. These were not actors in prosthetics. Harry and Daisy Earles, Johnny Eck, the conjoined Hilton sisters, the microcephalic performers billed as pinheads, Prince Randian the “Living Torso,” Josephine Joseph — Browning brought the actual circus onto an MGM soundstage and pointed a camera at them. The reaction, then and for decades after, tells you more about the audience than about the film.

The story, and the trap inside it

Browning drew the plot from a Tod Robbins short story called “Spurs,” and set it in a travelling French circus. Hans, a performer of short stature (Harry Earles), is engaged to Frieda (his real-life sister Daisy Earles), but becomes infatuated with Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), the beautiful, full-sized trapeze artist. Cleopatra, together with her lover, the strongman Hercules (Henry Victor), discovers that Hans has inherited a fortune. She feigns affection, marries him, and sets about poisoning him slowly to claim the money. The other performers — the community Browning films with such patient, affectionate detail — gradually realise what is being done to one of their own.

The structural cunning of the film is that it spends its first hour dismantling the very expectation its title sets up. You arrive braced to gawp. What Browning gives you instead is domesticity: the performers courting, gossiping, mothering their babies, playing pranks, defending their dignity. A woman with no arms lights a cigarette and drinks with her feet, filmed matter-of-factly at a table. Prince Randian, born without limbs, rolls and lights his own cigarette in an unbroken take of astonishing self-possession. The camera treats all of this as ordinary, because to these people it was ordinary. By the time the plot’s cruelty arrives, Browning has quietly rewired your sympathies so completely that the monsters of the piece are unmistakably the two beautiful, able-bodied schemers.

Why it works, despite everything

Freaks is not, by conventional measure, a well-made film. MGM cut it savagely — more on that below — and what survives is choppy, its performances uneven, its melodrama creaky in the pre-Code manner. Yet it works, and it works because of a single directorial conviction that overrides every flaw: Browning’s absolute refusal to condescend to his cast.

The craft is in the framing. Browning shoots the performers at their own eye level, in medium shots that grant them the full dignity of the frame, and he lets their actions play out in long, unhurried takes that dare you to keep watching. Contrast the theatrical, almost hammy staging of Cleopatra and Hercules, filmed like the silent-melodrama villains they are, with the naturalism afforded to the sideshow community, and the film’s moral architecture becomes visible in the grammar of the shots themselves. The “normal” people perform; the “freaks” simply live. Browning knew exactly what he was doing.

There is real experience behind that empathy. Browning had run away to join a travelling carnival as a young man, working as a contortionist and a barker, and the film is soaked in a firsthand knowledge of circus life that no researcher could fake. The famous wedding-feast sequence, in which the performers welcome Cleopatra into their fold with a chanted ritual — offering her their communal cup, chanting that she is now one of them — is the emotional hinge of the film and comes straight from that lived understanding of the sideshow as a fierce, closed, self-protecting family. When Cleopatra recoils from the ritual in disgust, she seals her fate, because she has insulted the one thing these people will not forgive an insult to: their solidarity.

What MGM did to it

The film’s history is inseparable from its reception, which was catastrophic. Test screenings were disastrous; one apocryphal account has a woman threatening to sue, claiming the film caused her to miscarry. MGM panicked. The studio hacked roughly a third of the film out — it reportedly ran around ninety minutes and now survives at close to sixty-four — excising subplots, softening the ending, and adding a mealy-mouthed prologue that frames the whole thing as a cautionary tale and pleads for the audience’s sympathy in advance. The cut footage is lost, almost certainly destroyed, and every viewer since has watched a wounded, incomplete version of Browning’s intent.

Then the film was banned. It was pulled from wide release in America, and in the United Kingdom it was refused a certificate outright and remained effectively banned for some thirty years. Louis B. Mayer is said to have loathed it and wished it had never been made. It disappeared. Browning’s reputation went with it. The film that would eventually be recognised as his masterpiece was the instrument of his professional destruction.

Its resurrection came, as so many of these resurrections did, through the counterculture. Freaks was rediscovered on the repertory and midnight circuit of the 1960s, where a new generation read its outcast solidarity as radical rather than repugnant, and it has climbed steadily in critical estimation ever since.

The bloodline

For a collector, Freaks is a taproot, and its descendants are everywhere once you learn to see them. Its most direct spiritual heir is John Waters, who has cited it as a foundational text and whose entire career amounts to handing the leading roles to the people polite society files under “monstrous.” The kinship is unmistakable in Pink Flamingos and the art of bad taste, where the outcast is again the hero and the respectable world the true grotesque. Waters simply took Browning’s tenderness and armed it with a grin.

The film also invented a durable horror grammar: the monstrous body that turns out to house the sympathetic soul, and the beautiful body that turns out to house the monster. That inversion runs straight into the body-horror tradition, and you can watch it play out with real feeling in Basket Case and the Times Square body-horror fable, where a deformed conjoined twin is again both threat and victim, and the audience is again forced to choose sides against its first instinct.

And there is a deeper ancestor to acknowledge, one that shares Browning’s documentary impulse to point the camera at the genuinely uncanny and let it be strange. The founding gesture of putting real, unsettling human material on screen and framing it as spectacle reaches back to the silent era’s boldest experiment, Häxan and the 1922 documentary-horror hybrid, which mixed the real and the staged in pursuit of a truth conventional drama could not reach. Both films were banned, both were decades ahead of their audiences, and both survive as proof that the most transgressive thing a camera can do is simply refuse to look away.

The verdict

Freaks is a damaged, compromised, unrepeatable film, and it is one of the most humane things Hollywood ever produced almost by accident. The version we have is a ruin, and even in ruin it is more morally serious than most of the polished horror that followed it. Its subject is not deformity. Its subject is solidarity — the loyalty of the excluded, and the cost of betraying it — and it treats that subject with a gravity and affection that its own studio found unbearable.

The tragedy is double. The film destroyed Browning, and the studio destroyed the film, and we will never see what he actually made. What remains is enough to place him among the great American directors and to make the smug prologue MGM bolted on read as an unintentional confession: the people who needed to plead for the audience’s sympathy were never the performers. They were the executives who could not bear to look at them.

Where to see it: the film is out of copyright confusion at last and circulates in a decent restoration; the Warner Archive edition is the one to seek. Come for the reputation, stay for the wedding feast, and try to remember which of the people on screen you were taught to fear.

Spoilers below

The revenge is the film’s legend, and MGM’s butchery falls most heavily here. As Hans sickens under Cleopatra’s slow poisoning, the community closes ranks. In the climax, staged during a violent nighttime storm as the circus caravan flees along muddy roads, the performers move against Cleopatra and Hercules with terrible, coordinated purpose. Browning films them crawling through the mud beneath the wagons, knives in hand, in images of genuine nightmare power — the “freaks” the title promised finally revealed as fearsome, but only in defence of one of their own.

The famous final image shows what became of Cleopatra. In a carnival-barker epilogue, we see her transformed into “the Feathered Hen,” a limbless, disfigured sideshow attraction — the great beauty reduced to the very spectacle she despised, made one of the community by force after she refused to join it by love. It is a grotesque and morally vertiginous ending, and it is where the surviving cut and Browning’s lost intent diverge most: the original reportedly included the fate of Hercules as well, footage now gone forever.

The added studio ending softens all of this with a reconciliation between Hans and Frieda that most critics regard as a graft, tonally at odds with the horror that precedes it. Watch the revenge sequence and the Feathered Hen reveal, then stop, and you have the film Browning meant — a fable in which cruelty to the outsider returns, transformed and amplified, upon the beautiful people who thought themselves untouchable. It is one of the cruellest and most just endings in early horror, and the studio spent thirty years trying to bury it.