Even people who’ve never seen Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks are likely familiar with one of its most famous scenes: a banquet attended by unusual sideshow performers, gathered in celebration around a table covered with a checkered cloth and an assortment of champagne bottles. Welcoming a new member to the fold, they chant, “One of us, one of us!”
More than ninety years after its release, Freaks is remembered as a Pre-Code Hollywood cult classic and an uncommon artistic feat (it was added to the National Film Registry in 1994). But it wasn’t always perceived that way, and even today, with an understanding of its role in film history, it fuels discussions about depictions of disability and difference in popular culture.
The movie’s narrative [spoilers ahead] revolves around the lovely circus aerialist Cleopatra, who romantically pursues little person Hans, a performer in the sideshow. Hans is engaged to a fellow performer, but Cleopatra has her eyes on Hans’s sizable inheritance. She enlists the strongman (and her actual boyfriend), Hercules, in a plot to seduce and poison Hans. At first the sideshow crew accepts Cleopatra (see “One of us!” above), but once Hans figures out her plan and her disdain for the other sideshow performers, he plots revenge. The remainder of the film involves a fraught chase in which the “freaks” capture Cleopatra and mutilate her so she’s fated to appear as a fearsome curiosity in the sideshow she so disliked.
The production draws on a long history of curiosity amusements in which people looked to be entertained by viewing others with unusual or non-normative bodies, especially in nineteenth-century Western circus and dime museums. Disability historian Robert Bogdan has divided this sort of presentation into two general types: the “aggrandized,” in which a performer’s difference is celebrated and embellished, and the “exoticized,” in which differences are made to seem foreign or fearsome.
Mikita Brottman and David Brottman point out that the latter, more sensational, mode was often the more appealing in entertainment. “In the early twentieth century,” they explain,
a common ignorance about other races coupled with a belief in inherent racial inferiority and the undisputed superiority of western culture made the exotic mode of presentation highly popular until well into the 1930s.
When Browning was directing and producing Freaks, then, the circus sideshow was broadly culturally legible and in interplay with cinema as an evolving part of variety entertainment.
By the time he came to Freaks, Browning was renowned as the director of Universal Pictures’ 1931 movie Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. Browning had also served as Dracula’s co-producer, pairing with Carl Laemmle Jr, son of Universal’s founder. Following Dracula, Laemmle produced Frankenstein, another Universal release and one of the most fundamental movies in modern Gothic horror. MGM Studios’ Irving Thalberg hired Browning in an effort to compete with Universal’s growing suite of popular monster movies.
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In addition to the studio mandate to crush the competition, Browning had an additional motivation to focus his film on sideshow. According to film scholar Hugh S. Manon, “it is difficult to ignore the obvious biographical connection between [Browning’s] film and his youthful experience as a magician’s assistant and showman in the American carnival sideshow circuit.”
For many audience members in the 1930s, “sideshow” was shorthand for a frightening sort of otherness. The non-normative body invited judgment, gawking, fascination, and horror all at once, and it powered a sizeable, lucrative economy of display.
Circus scholar Aine Norris notes concepts of “freakery” were
part of a larger conversation happening at the turn of the century regarding what it meant for a body to be pure or worthy of life. The eugenics movement raged in America and abroad, and bodies deemed as ‘freaks’ could be subject to investigation, sterilization, or institutionalization.
With this in mind, Browning deliberately worked to humanize the actors. Rather than enlist career film actors, he cast a number of then-active performers to appear as themselves, including conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, Prince Randian the Living Torso, Jonny Eck the Half-Boy, Koo Koo the Bird Girl, and Schlitzie the “pinhead.” The performers are shown living their lives on the circus backlot, having relationships, building families, and participating in the performance life and ecosystem of the circus.
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Audiences were asked to consider that the display of human difference was dehumanizing or even exploitative but also to understand that the sideshow represented a locus of community and a way for disabled performers to make an independent living. The film’s arc demonstrates that, even though mainstream society would consider them unusual if not grotesque, the tight-knit sideshow community showed a clear contrast between perception and reality, assumption and skill, “their monstrous physical appearance and their morally superior characters,” write Brottman and Brottman.
Freaks wasn’t critically well received, however.
“Seen by both critics and moral watchdogs as a disreputably ‘low’ product,” media scholar David Church writes, “the film failed at the box office in most areas and was quickly withdrawn from circulation by MGM amid calls for increased movie censorship.”
The movie was banned in the United Kingdom for decades. By the 1950s, though, both culture and cinema were in a different place. Audiences had come to embrace B-movie glory, unusual stories, and the idea of cult midnight screenings built around the idea of outsider community. Though twentieth-century audiences were far less likely to see a sideshow in person than had been crowds in Browning’s era, this may have been a mark in Freaks’s favor. Changes in culture “opened the door to re-release Freaks,” writes Norris. “[M]id-century audiences, decades removed from actual sideshows, could consider the film’s allegory without the same cultural baggage.”
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