FREAKS

The beautiful trapeze artist Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) pretends to love the dwarf Hans (Harry Earles) and marries him in order to rob him and poison him with the complicity of the athlete Hercules (Henry Victor). However, the plan is discovered by the other ‘monsters’ of the circus (the freaks who give the film its title) who carry out their revenge by horribly mutilating the two lovers. An ill-fated and legendary film, first produced and then disowned by MGM, Freaks is a disturbing hymn to innocent monstrosity versus guilty normality. Browning tempered the harrowing screenplay with an almost surgical direction in an attempt – successful – to exalt the humanity of the freaks without any morbidity: the protagonists are the ‘different’, the freaks of nature, who, united among themselves and governed by a sort of law of honour, clash with the cruelty and perverse attraction of the ‘normal’.