Freaks (1932)

Film: Freaks (1932)
Stars: Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova, Harry Earles, Daisy Earles, Henry Victor
Director: Tod Browning
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Few films in the horror movie pantheon illicit more hushed reverence than the film Freaks.  A flop when it first premiered in 1932 (it largely destroyed Browning's promising career after Dracula) the movie has been saved in recent years by critics and cult film fans alike, those who admire its daring and uniqueness in the world of movies.  I'll admit, I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to be seeing about ten minutes into the (very short) movie, shocked at some of the nastiness of the film, its strange "this is just a day in the life" sorts of sequences, and then the final ten minutes, which nearly ninety years later are horrifying and genuinely creepy.  The film didn't hold me the way it did some critics, but it's easy to applaud the pictures daring and moxie-Freaks is a movie that distinguishes itself in a way few films before and after ever have.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about, essentially, the day in a life of a band of traveling "freaks," circus side show attractions such as little people (played by siblings Harry and Daisy Earles), as well as a pair of more "normal" figures (Henry Victor as Hercules the Strong Man and Olga Baclanova as Cleopatra the Tightrope Artist), who mock their troupe mates but are trying to use Harry Earles's Hans for his inheritance.  Cleopatra plans to marry Hans and then murder him to get his money, but the plan is eventually found out in a truly terrifying spectacle.  Cleopatra, after getting drunk, is uncomfortable with being associated with the freaks, who memorably chant "gooba gobble, one of us" repeatedly to invite a "normal" into their midst.

It's here where Freaks is at its best-cruelly looking and inverting audience's expectations of whom the hero is.  To modern audiences who have been conditioned on John Hughes films, we know that the most traditionally beautiful figures in the film aren't the good guys, and so our inclination is to assume the worst of the pretty girl humoring Hans, but at the time this wasn't the case, and it's still genuinely revolting to watch Cleopatra lash out at the "freaks," treating them like garbage.  Drunk and angry, she dismisses the people she shares a trailer next to every day as sub-human, reinforcing their worst fears about letting an outsider in, and as a result cloistering themselves further from the world.  The movie goes to great strides to show that they're just "normal" people who want to love, have children, and live their lives, so to have someone forty minutes into the picture dismiss them based solely on their appearance is relatively groundbreaking.

That said, the film earns its spot as a horror classic in the film's last twenty minutes.  After it's discovered that Hercules and Cleopatra were, indeed, trying to kill Hans, the troupe seek their revenge in a harrowing scene that shows them chasing both of the perpetrators into the night.  While we don't see the end result for Hercules (supposedly in now lost footage he was castrated), but we do see Cleopatra resorted to being a duck woman, with her legs cut off and her permanently tarred-and-feathered.  It's perhaps not the best message to the audience that the most horrifying thing a freak could do to another person is to make someone a "freak," and truly make them "one of us," but that doesn't mean it doesn't petrify the audience on a baser level.

The film has been mirrored and muted by decades of preaching tolerance at the movies, so that some of its initial message has been diluted for a modern audience, and the mundane aspects of their lives come across as boring even if they're building to prove a point.  As a result, the only truly thrilling aspects for me as an audience member were those last twenty minutes, but man is that a staggering way to end a movie, one that would rival a modern-day horror film for sheer fright.  For that, I have to tip my hat to Freaks, arguably the most genuinely scary film we've encountered so far in this marathon.

This Month We Are Seeing As Many Classic Horror Movies from the Pre-1970 Era as Possible.  If you want to check out some of our past reviews, here they are:

Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Dracula, Mad Love, Son of Frankenstein, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Mummy