FREAKS (1932)

timshelboy


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It's one of the 27 movies out 1000s watched that I have rated 10/10. This movie will always remain very close to my heart.

No problems with your ratings though. I understand people think differently.

Strange offbeat horror flick.

The moral and ethical message is the movie's stand against that era's attitude towards people with disabilities and deformities,
especially in the wake of the eugenics movement that was highly popular in the first half of the 20th century. Locking people away
in dingy, unsanitary institutions; performing lobotomies and involuntary sterilizations on those with mental or emotional issues; abandoning them on the streets; even euthanizing those with physical and mental abnormalities
were practices that were not only condoned, but even encouraged in those years. The movement culminated in Hitler's liquidation of
the disabled, the infirm, and the elderly (and eventually those of particular races and ethnicities, political beliefs, and sexual identities). Was it just coincidence that one of the villains of the movie, the strongman, is played by Henry Victor, an actor raised in Germany who specialized in playing Nazi thugs in movies? Madame Tetrallini protects the disabled "children" and pleads for understanding and compassion; the freaks see the circus as a safe haven from the hostility of the "normal" world. What the freaks end up doing to Cleopatra may seem brutal, but it's a foreshadowing of the real-life cruelty inflicted on the victims of the Nazis. Browning wanted to emphasize the humanity of the "freaks" vs. the brutality they suffered from many "normal" people; unfortunately, a lot of the film which centered on this angle was edited out, and it was refashioned by distributors as a horror film. Many of the freaks who appeared in the film were not permitted to eat in the MGM studio cafeteria and were forced to eat their lunches outside instead, as if they were animals. Cleopatra's transformation at the end of the film
is a reflection of this attitude.

  Yeah, later, when Hollywood finally got up the courage to depict Nazis as the bad guys. But those who were paying attention back then were well aware of what was going on in Germany in the 1920s, and of the mutual admiration society between Hitler and American racists. Hitler was a big admirer of the KKK in the US, its Jim Crow and other race laws, and its genocide of Native Americans. He especially admired the American eugenics movement and adapted it for his own government. Meanwhile, some "very fine people" at the Rockefeller Institute were happy to provide a grant of nearly half a million dollars for funding the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, for the rationalization of sterilization, medical experimentation, and weeding out of particular people. Maybe it was all just a coincidence that the bad guy was German, but it was prophetic.
 

And Hollywood films never have anything to do with politics. 

All this talk of Freaks prompted me to dust off my DVD and watch it last night. I see that it has its fair share of detractors on this board, but after seeing Freaks again I think it still holds up quite well. I find it to be a delightful mixture of humor and flat-out horror. There are wonderful characterizations among the real-life people with deformities, and they all perform well. I think that Frida is a real sweetheart, and it's especially touching when she says to Hans "to me, you are a man."

The scene where the "freaks" are chasing Cleo through the rain and mud is quite effective and unsettling; it's unsurprising that a 1930s audience found it too disturbing. It's a shame that the extra footage of that sequence still remains lost (apparently it was strongly hinted that Hercules was castrated).

The "one of us" chanting scene was very memorable and has become somewhat iconic and has been spoofed many times (in particular the South Park episode "Butters' Very Own Episode").

Freaks was severely underappreciated in its time, largely from being banned for decades, but has since become regarded as a true horror classic, and rightfully so.