Freaks 1932

5.1/10. Sometimes it’s hard to discern the line between exploitation and embrace, especially when dealing with a film from more than eighty years ago. Freaks, a film that puts people with deformities and developmental disabilities front and center, is ostensibly on their side. The theme of the film is that these people, derided by monsters for their outside appearance, are or at least can be, kind and decent people, in contrast to the film’s antagonist who are pretty on the outside or blessed with physical advantages our eponymous heroes lack, but ugly and cruel on the inside.

The film delivers with message with what amounts to a fable set in the circus. Hans, a little person who is a part of the sideshow, is engaged to Frieda, another little person who’s in the act, but becomes enamored with Cleo, a beautiful acrobat in the circus. Cleo initially just uses Hans’s affections for gifts and attention, whilst carrying on behind his back with Hercules, the circus’s strongman, but when she learns from Frieda that Hans has inherited a great fortune, she conspires with Hercules to marry him and then poison him so that they can take the money for themselves.

The rub is pretty straightforward. Despite pretty reprehensibly leaving his fiancé, Hans wants only the best for Cleo and more importantly, the “freaks” accept Cleo into their community. The chants of “One of us! One of us!” and “Gooble gobble!” have become iconic, but what’s often left off from the popular quotation is the other third of the chant – “We accept her!” There’s a divide between the “freaks” and the “regular people” at the circus, one that can lead to mutual mistrust, but the community welcomes Cleo despite that, because, they believe, she loves one of them, and that’s good enough for her to become one of them.

This, of course, is a bridge too far for Cleo, who can’t accept the communion offered to her by this community, and reveals, if not the details of her plans, then the fact that the “romance” was an act on her part. The “freaks” are shown to be kind, welcoming people, and Cleo and Hercules, the “normal people,” are shown to be harsh and even evil. We’re supposed to root for the people with deformities and against the beautiful and the strong.

And yet, even if director Tod Browning’s heart is in the right place in terms of theme, there’s something that still feels exploitative and condescending about the film. Far from focused on this main narrative, Freaks is filled to the brim with minor subplots and vignettes about the other denizens of the sideshow. Aside from the fact these little detours practically kill the film’s already consistently-sputtering pacing, they also seem to be putting the stars of the film into the same kinds of gawking “otherness” that it implicitly criticizes the film’s antagonist for.

Most of these scenes involve focusing on the quirks of the various “freaks” for laugh or for curiosity. Whether it’s showing how a man without limbs can light his own cigarette unassisted, or taunts at a person said to be half-male and half-female, or a continuing subplot about one conjoined twin being able to feel what happens to the other and the unique hurdles of their dating life, there’s less a sense that this is a kind look at people who differ from the norm, so much as it is presented as a chance to chuckle or marvel at what is, at best, an air of exoticness, and at worst, a tone derision and oddity.

This also plays into Freaks’s difficulties as a horror movie. The film’s scariest moment takes place in its climax, where the eponymous collection of sideshow acts advances upon the villain of the piece in the midst of a horrible storm. The scene is impressively shot, with an unnerving sequence of these individuals brandishing guns and knives and other weapons and descending upon Cleo under cover of darkness. There’s something frightening and tense about the steady pursuit, that feels of a piece with the zombie films that would emerge decade later.

That, however, is the part of the problem. While Browning can charitably be said to have intended to depict a close-knit community defending one of its own against an external evil, there’s a firm sense in which the “freaks” are dehumanized in these scenes, treated as primitively tribal or animalistic. While Hans and Frieda are given full, if thin, characterization, and the benefits of some pathos (which veers into pity), the other individuals with deformities or disabilities are treated less kindly, even as the film seems to want its audience to sympathize with them.

But it also gives us two “normal” characters to latch onto: Phroso, a clown and Venus, another beautiful circus performer. Their only purpose in the film appears to be to give the audience some non-“freaks” to root for as good guys in the midst of the movie’s main plot, and the rushed story of their romance sputters on all the way to a tacked-on happy ending that shows a reunion between Frieda and Hans. It’s part and parcel with the array of go-nowhere vignettes that are spackled into the main narrative of the piece.

Still, some allowances have to be made for the time in which this film was released. While it’s easy for me to look back from the vantage point of 2016 when our treatment of such individuals has vastly approved (contrary to the programming lineup of TLC) and judge the way in which the deformed or disabled are depicted in Freaks, Browning at least has the decency of wanting the audience to like the titular group that are the selling point of his film. The tone he takes to do so may be, at times, rather patronizing or othering, but he wants the “freaks” to be people that the audience cares for rather than recoils from. While he’s still content to put the things that make them atypical on display for a buck, much the same way as the carnival barker in his frame story, there’s an attempt to make the humanity of the “freaks” shine through, which helps to soften the palpable feeling of exploitation that permeates the film.

The fact that this movie destroyed the carrier of Tod Browning (Dracula) amazes me. The idea of the movie is really innovative for the 20s, even if the original picture is considered to be even more brutal and totally different from this shorter final version and for that, I will not consider what is told about the original script.

The plot has been said to be predictive, and it is, it is also said to be unrealistic, which is not. There is no fantasy in a person taking advantage of another in a situation of one-sided love. Hans loves Cleopatra, a man with Dwarfism loves the epitome of beauty which is represented by Cleopatra, she, knowing that can manipulate him easily, takes advantage of that, I can't see how is that fantastical.

Though the movie depicts the Olga's and Henry Victor's character as the villains, I didn't feel that only the beauty and "normal" people are actually villains since there is Venus, a character that I found it rather likable, especially with its opening scene showing her dumping Hercules, and Phroso character is also likable. A clown that is kind to everyone in the circus. Even the scene that least like with Phroso - him forgetting his date with Venus or him getting too flirty with the twins for the sake of entertainment - is not horrible. I still find Venus the most likable character.
And from here we have the one being fooled, Hans. From the start of the movie, I didn't even have a chance to see him as a lovable character. While he states, in the beginning, his love for Frieda, he ends up marrying Cleoprata. This makes him unlikable to a certain degree, while at the same time understandable for why he got so psychotic in the ending.

There is also the secondary characters, Roscoe seems a jackass and because of that I didn't get what one of the Twins saw in him, his best scene being when the other Twin's fiance appears and he is actually polite for once - which it doesn't make him any more of a douche. I didn't find the scenes of the "freaks" entertaining, but I did like the scene of Schlitze and Phroso. And for the least the worse, those fat asses that kept antagonizing everyone in the circus and that scene where Hercules punches Josephine Joseph without any kind of consequence.

The ending was actually bad, not the scene where Hercules gets its due or Cleopatra - whatever the hell happens to her, but the added scene where Frieda forgives Hans for his foolishness. And I also found it to be extremely weird the scene where they show what happens to Cleopatra, she turned into a chicken? WTF happened? Weird ass ending for me.

I first watched this on a golden oldie channel in a cabin in the middle of the night, in the middle of the woods, by myself because my parents were away for the weekend, when I was 12.

Im now 40 (I think), and for all these years this movie has stuck with me as one of the most terrifying things I've ever seen.

But now I'm watching this again (though many scenes are missing the version I watched was at least 20 minutes longer) and I feel for the people they exploited for this movie. All these years I held on to the believe this was some must watch shocker. But I was wrong. I've grown a lot since I was 12. I don't get that same feeling. There are some genuine good messages here but I feel they're overshadowed by just showing off "freaks".

I don't know how to feel after rewatching this. Apart from I'm ashamed of the way I was as a child.

Ive been after this movie since I started collecting and now that I own the bluray, I feel like Ahab caught Moby Dick. What's the point.

Also, I'm not gonna give this a score. This seriously got me thinking.