If there ever was a time when film making could get away with producing movies that bordered on blatantly exploitative, the pre-Code 1930s were it. Tod Browning, director of Dracula, went one definitive step further and effectively killed his own career when he took the reigns of directing FREAKS, a project that was turned down by Myrna Loy when offered the lead since she deemed it to be too offensive as it was.
She may have been right, but nowadays, FREAKS stands as one of the shortest yet most effective horror movies of all time due to its chilling climactic sequence. The plot's plausibility can be in itself questioned -- where can a circus performer who's a midget have all the money he is said to have in the film is anyone's guess -- but since this is a horror story, and an excellent one, suspension of disbelief allows one to sort of accept what's being explained to us.
Hans (Harry Earles), the little performer at the center of this story, rejects equally little person Frieda (Daisy Earles), loves Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), a platinum blonde trapeze artist, herself involved with strongman Hercules (Henry Victor). Eventually, through a series of events, Cleopatra marries Hans for money, but she goes out of her way to humiliate him at the wedding reception, horrified as the other circus "freaks" chant "Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble, we will make you one of us." Oh, how dead-serious they are in their eerie chant.
When the band of freaks find out she has been poisoning Hans to get his money and that her strongman lover has raped Venus (Leila Hyams), another performer who's always been good to them, they exact a horrific revenge against the both of them, and the last 10 minutes of FREAKS are as gruesome as terrifying.
This film was initially received with so much repulsion from audiences that MGM virtually disowned the film. Only until much later has it been re-discovered as a horror classic, and again, while some of the plot elements don't hold water today, the basic story of the abused and disabled taking charge of their own lives and punishing their abusers stands on its own today. That actual disabled people were used as actors only makes it more daring and adds to both the creepiness of the movie's feel and enhances their final moment on screen and only enhances the final ironic reel.
She may have been right, but nowadays, FREAKS stands as one of the shortest yet most effective horror movies of all time due to its chilling climactic sequence. The plot's plausibility can be in itself questioned -- where can a circus performer who's a midget have all the money he is said to have in the film is anyone's guess -- but since this is a horror story, and an excellent one, suspension of disbelief allows one to sort of accept what's being explained to us.
Hans (Harry Earles), the little performer at the center of this story, rejects equally little person Frieda (Daisy Earles), loves Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), a platinum blonde trapeze artist, herself involved with strongman Hercules (Henry Victor). Eventually, through a series of events, Cleopatra marries Hans for money, but she goes out of her way to humiliate him at the wedding reception, horrified as the other circus "freaks" chant "Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble, we will make you one of us." Oh, how dead-serious they are in their eerie chant.
When the band of freaks find out she has been poisoning Hans to get his money and that her strongman lover has raped Venus (Leila Hyams), another performer who's always been good to them, they exact a horrific revenge against the both of them, and the last 10 minutes of FREAKS are as gruesome as terrifying.
This film was initially received with so much repulsion from audiences that MGM virtually disowned the film. Only until much later has it been re-discovered as a horror classic, and again, while some of the plot elements don't hold water today, the basic story of the abused and disabled taking charge of their own lives and punishing their abusers stands on its own today. That actual disabled people were used as actors only makes it more daring and adds to both the creepiness of the movie's feel and enhances their final moment on screen and only enhances the final ironic reel.