"Freaks" - Film Review

“Gooble-gobble! We accept her! One of us!” and so with that haunting chant, the good-natured, mocked circus performers of Freaks strike an odd chord with us. It’s one of those lines that has since blown up far bigger than the cult morality tale itself.

Though overlooked in its own time due to the "sensitive virtues" of theater goers, Freaks is a film whose success has grown with time. Much of what makes the film so great: it's shock value, it's many scares, and how genuinely touching it can be were discovered much later in midnight movie screenings in the 70's and 80's.

At the same time, Freaks is one of those Pre-Code Hollywood films that would never have gotten made after 1934. Once the Hays Code kicked in, some of the more objectionable material of the film would never have passed the standards test. As it stands much of the brilliant final sequence where the titular “freaks” take their revenge on the “normal” people, who turn out to be the real freaks, has been significantly cut for how graphic it apparently was. But it didn’t need to be any more explicit than it already was. We’re given an incredibly good sense of how far the justifiable vengeance sought upon Olga Baclanova’s Cleopatra and Henry Victor’s Hercules goes. 

Neither do I believe Freaks would get made nowadays; though it has some modern sensibilities to its narrative (it’s realistic, loving depiction of the circus performers feels like something films would shy away from until the breakdown of studio control in the 70’s), there’s still a fair level of quaintness to the film. A number of the film’s plots are just everyday occurrences, “slice of life” pieces about the performers that never go anywhere. Plus much of the film is blatantly black and white in its moral relativity. But that’s totally cool; we want to see the circus performers get back after all the jokes, criticisms, and eventually attempted extortion.  

Director Tod Browning (who directed the original Dracula) actually spent time as part of a traveling circus and drew upon his experiences for making the film. Browning went out of his way to hire real carnival performers and its part of the film’s charm. If the characters had just been actors in prosthetics it wouldn’t have the same impact. 

Though some of its execution isn’t particularly graceful, it’s still one of those oft-forgotten gems of the early years of Hollywood. Oh, and that final sequence where the “freaks” get their revenge still holds water; it’s one of the scariest and most memorable sequences in all of cinema. 

Grade: A-