Freaks (1932)

Few films from Hollywood's early sound era carry quite as much baggage as Freaks. Released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1932, it arrived at an odd moment: the pre-Code period when studios were testing what audiences and censors would tolerate, and testing it fairly hard. The film's premise is blunt enough. A glamorous trapeze artist, Cleopatra, agrees to marry Hans, the leader of a circus sideshow troupe, with an eye on his considerable inheritance rather than any genuine affection. When the sideshow performers discover the deception, the consequences are severe. What made the film genuinely shocking to contemporary audiences, and what still makes it an uncomfortable watch today, was that the sideshow performers were not actors in makeup or prosthetics. They were real people, many of them veterans of travelling circus sideshows: people with microcephaly, missing limbs, conjoined twins and other conditions that had, for generations, been put on public display as entertainment. MGM was, in its own way, doing exactly the same thing.

Tod Browning had already established himself as a director willing to work in genuinely unsettling territory. His earlier collaboration with Lon Chaney, The Unknown (1927), showed a filmmaker drawn to physical difference, obsession, and the darker currents running beneath circus and carnival life. Freaks feels, in many ways, like a continuation of those preoccupations, stripped of the protective layer of a star performer playing a role. The cast here is led by Harry Earles as Hans, alongside his real-life sister Daisy Earles, with Olga Baclanova as Cleopatra and Henry Victor as her co-conspirator. Wallace Ford rounds out the principal players as one of the sideshow's more conventionally built members. The film runs to just 64 minutes in its surviving form (a longer cut was screened and then pulled; what exactly was removed remains a matter of film history debate), and that truncated runtime gives it an abrupt, slightly raw quality that arguably suits the material. MGM, by most accounts, did not know what it had made once it had made it, and the film was withdrawn from circulation not long after release, resurfacing decades later on the exploitation circuit, which did its reputation no particular favours.

The early 1930s were a fertile, strange period for genre cinema, producing films like The Invisible Man (1933) and Little Caesar (1931) that pushed at the boundaries of what mainstream studio pictures would tackle. Freaks sits in that company, polished but unremarkable on a technical level, yet genuinely singular in its choice of subject. Whether that singularity reflects something admirable or something troubling is, as you'll find below, very much up for discussion.

My stoner friend first showed me this. There’s no denying that Freaks is a disturbing film, not just for its content, but for the questions it raises about who it was made for and what it’s trying to achieve. Directed by Tod Browning, it features a cast of real performers with physical disabilities, drawn from circus sideshows, and places them at the heart of a dark morality tale about betrayal and revenge. On one level, it could be seen as an attempt to humanise those society marginalised. The film begins with a sense of community, warmth, and loyalty among the sideshow troupe. But it doesn’t take long for that empathy to curdle. The tone shifts uneasily, and the film starts to feel less like a plea for compassion and more like a voyeuristic spectacle. The able-bodied characters (particularly the villainous trapeze artist Cleopatra) are the ones who look and speak like “regular” people, while the disabled cast are framed through lingering close-ups that emphasise their differences. The infamous final act, with its grotesque, rain-soaked punishment, is meant to shock, but it crosses into exploitation, playing on fear and revulsion rather than delivering real justice or catharsis. It’s hard to watch without discomfort, and harder still to decide whether it’s progressive or prurient. At times it feels ahead of its time in giving space to voices rarely seen on screen; at others, it feels like it’s gawking at them. It’s not a film that aged well, nor one that feels truly respectful. Freaks is historically significant, yes, but it’s also deeply troubling, and its legacy is rightly complicated. More a curiosity than a classic.

I keep coming back to that word "curiosity", because it feels like the honest place to land. There's a version of film history that treats Freaks as a misunderstood masterpiece, reclaimed from the exploitation bins and elevated to canonical status, and I understand the impulse. It is unlike almost anything else from the period, and there are moments where it genuinely earns the sympathy it seems to be reaching for. But sympathy and respect aren't the same thing, and the film muddles the two in ways that are hard to forgive with a century's hindsight. If you're coming to it out of curiosity about pre-Code Hollywood or Browning's career, it's worth seeing once. Just don't expect to feel good about it afterwards, and don't expect the discomfort to come from the people it pretends to be celebrating.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 1932  | Watched: 2025-07-29

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Trailer

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Tod Browning: The Unknown (1927)
More from the 1930s: Earth (1930) · Monkey Business (1931) · Sabotage (1936) · People on Sunday (1930)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)