The Bite #97

Tod Browning And The Inherent Humanity Of FREAKS, X-ray Art And MORE!

February 19, 2020

In this Issue:

Horror History: Tod Browning And The Inherent Humanity Of Freaks
Image of the Week: Defying Expectations
Tiny Bites – This Week’s Best Horror Headlines
Things We Love: Tailor-Made Terror
Hey, That’s Us! – Shudder in the News

HORROR HISTORY: TOD BROWNING AND THE INHERENT HUMANITY OF FREAKS

I doubt Dracula director Tod Browning could ever have fathomed that when he convinced MGM to buy the rights to Tod Robbins’ story, Spurs, it would change not just his life, but those of the audiences who encountered it. He certainly could never have known how much it would affect a disabled girl living Sacramento who wanted to write about movies but never expected to see herself represented.

Freaks is a film I hold close to my heart, as do a lot of film lovers and historians who discuss its place in the world of disabled representation. The story is about a family of circus performers — all played by actual disabled circus performers — who band together when one of their own is preyed upon by an able-bodied person. It has been considered a dirty, exploitative picture, and, in my case, a revolutionary one. It may have ruined Browning’s career, but that’s more because it’s a movie that sides as wholeheartedly as it can with its disabled leads.

Reading Freaks in 2020 involves looking at both Browning’s own history as well as how it frames and presents the circus “oddities”, ironically in a way that still feels progressive today.

Browning grew up in a circus family, so he understood the way everyone banded together; a group of nomads and outcasts, everyone felt like an outsider in the beginning. Filming Freaks was perceived by Browning as a love letter to the people he knew. Watching the movie, especially in a landscape where disabled people are still seen as saintly or pitying, it’s clear that Browning eschews that. Yes, it is a horror film, but it is about the horror of how the able-bodied treat those different from them.

The beautiful Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) finds little person Hans (Harry Earles) to be nothing more than a child she can manipulate. She chronically coos over him, pinches his cheeks and likens him to a baby. When the two are married in a macabre ceremony, she forces him to ride a pony (drawing comparisons to P.T. Barnum’s purchased Little Person, Tom Thumb).

The various circus performers are presented frankly, their disabilities on full display. Browning even goes so far as to show the mundane adaptations these people utilize, like Frances O’Conner’s armless character eating with her feet. For Browning, there’s nothing unique about this — it’s just how these people live. Yet, time and again, he reminds the audience of how mistreated these people are. When a group of microcephalics play by the river, they’re shooed away from able-bodied visitors who see them as monsters.

There’s an added air of meta-commentary watching this now, knowing that studio head Irving Thalberg tried to sell this as a scuzzy, haunting exploitation picture, perceiving the movie as the story of monsters, at odds with Browning’s vision. In a way, Browning was commenting on the studio heads themselves.

Watching Freaks today is to see a movie that uses horror to prove a point. Who are the monsters in this situation? It isn’t the characters espoused by the title. Freaks is a movie that tries to serve an underrepresented community but that failed to thrive in 1932. Maybe in 2020 we can appreciate it a bit more.

*Kristen Lopez is IndieWire’s TV Editor and a freelance pop culture essayist whose work has appeared in Forbes, MTV, and The Hollywood Reporter. She also runs the classic film podcast, Ticklish Business.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Defying Expectations

Italian artist Benedetta Bonichi uses Xrays in her art, using the medical imaging technique to play with reality and our concepts of truth. This image, Collana Di Perle, blends the image of the perfect housewife and hostess with something more sinister and potentially predatory.

TINY BITES

A NEW GOONIES SERIES, THE FOG’S 40TH ANNIVERSARY AND MORE

Bong Joon-Ho isn’t slowing down after his mega Oscars wins. He has an action-horror project in the works and is being inducted into the Criterion Collection hall of cinema with Parasite and Memories Of Murder.

There’s a new Goonies series lined up where a teacher attempts to re-enact the film with her students.

Anita Flores uses specific films to cope with depression, anxiety, insomnia, and PMS in this personal essay.

For its 40th anniversary, SyFy Wire looks at how John Carpenter’s The Fog went from being a complete disaster to a beloved cult classic.

Check out these 10 guest appearances from horror icons outside of film, from Ash Versus Everyone and Mortal Kombat to Jason Voorhees on Arsenio Hall.

The Hunt is BACK ON with a brand new trailer and an updated release date of March 13th. Can we buy our tickets yet?

A24’s new horror venture, The Green Knight, has a trailer, and Vanity Fair is here for all the Dev Patel handsomeness and his starring in a role normally reserved for white men. We love to see it.

Want to know more about The Green Knight’s Arthurian origins? GQ and Newsweek have you covered.

We got three trailers this week for Quibi’s upcoming horror shorts — The Stranger, Survive, and Most Dangerous Game.

The Assistant, a drama from documentary filmmaker Kitty Green, is making waves as a covert horror movie inspired by the Weinstein scandal.

Valentine’s Day was all about the darker side of desire on Shudder with a collaborative look at our Love Sick collection.

New York Fashion Week is done, and the runway’s vampy beauty and gothic twists are some of Vogue’s highlights with odes to Blood and Lace and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

NPR wrote about the real-life lessons of fictional pandemics such as, you guessed it — Contagion.

THINGS WE LOVE

Tailor-Made Terror

Curt Tuckfield and Shane Hunt were huge fans of Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark as kids. When they’d given up hope of a fourth edition of the series, they decided to make one themselves as a tribute to the work of Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell.