We Accept Her: 90 Years of Freaks

We Accept Her: 90 Years of Freaks

Though it ought to be a snapshot of a bygone era, Tod Browning’s classic film still feels like a reflection

by Kathryn Finch

In 2008, Richard Butchins’ documentary The Last American Freakshow was summarily rejected from the London Disability Film Festival. Butchins’ film, a made-for-TV documentary about a mixed group of disabled and able-bodied people who aimed to “confront society’s cozy and patronizing views of what the disabled can and can’t do, by using the vehicle of a traditional freak show” was decried by potential funders as not “disability-empowering”. Despite its provenance (Butchins himself is disabled and much of his work has focused on the nuance of the subject) and the fact it was recommended by the festival’s own programmers, it was rejected after it made the head of BAFTA “uncomfortable”.

The pearl-clutching reaction to American Freakshow makes even less sense when contrasted with the uproarious response to films with superficially similar subject matter. 2017’s The Greatest Showman was an international hit; the fourth season of anthology juggernaut American Horror Story (subtitled Freakshow) is often ranked among the show’s fan favorites. So what’s the difference? If the issue were something as simple as a distaste for ableism, how then to explain the success of Showman or AHS4? The answer can be found in a film which, upon its release 90 years ago, was also rejected and banned before being reclaimed as a genre classic: the 1932 film Freaks.

The year is 1931. A beautiful blonde woman is trashing her wedding dinner after being made a little too welcome by her new husband’s friends. Meanwhile, a famous author is losing his lunch at the sight of a group of actors eating theirs. One of these is a scene that plays out within the film, one of the key incidents that establishes Cleopatra as its ultimate villain; the other is a very real event that took place during its filming, in which F. Scott Fitzgerald was so put off by the mere appearance of the cast that he fled the MGM studio cafeteria in disgust.

Fitzgerald was far from alone in his distaste. When it was first released in 1932, Freaks was almost universally reviled; it has the dubious distinction of being the first MGM-produced film to be pulled from circulation before the end of its domestic cinematic run; the original film stock was either destroyed or recycled, depending on who you ask. On a familiar note, it was banned in Britain for a grand total of 31 years, justified by the claim that it “exploited for commercial reasons the deformed people that it claimed to dignify”. To this day, it has its fair share of detractors.

Like American Freakshow, people often prefer to categorize Freaks as a horror film. In an early scene, a groundskeeper takes his master to where he has discovered some members of a travelling circus trespassing on his land. The groundskeeper rants and raves, describing them as monsters who should not be allowed to live. Later, around a table set for a wedding celebration, a collected band of circus performers (the eponymous “freaks”) pass around a goblet of seemingly ominous welcome, chanting “one of us!” as a beautiful (and completely able-bodied) woman marries into their group. She will later be chased through the grounds of the freak show, hunted and mutilated in retaliation for acting against the group. These latter images are the most enduring from Freaks. The horror (from the director of Dracula no less) seems clear on its face: these people are monsters; they’re freaks and if you’re not careful, you could be one too. Its ending, violent and retributive, certainly has the aesthetic sense of a horror. But its thesis is far more complex.

A distinct source of the instinctive dismissal of Freaks has always been its subject matter. The existence of freak shows and human zoos in all their variations is hardly something of which humanity should be proud. They are reminders of those forced into the margins; but also, critically, who is doing the forcing. Freaks was unique at the time for portraying an (at least relatively) accurate portrayal of the daily lives of the performers. Browning himself was inspired by over a decade spent in the circus and, though they had a complicated and often negative relationship to the film, the cast were mostly real-life performers. The film is not so much rejected for its offensiveness to the communities it purports to portray, but because the public—that is to say, the un-marginalized, able-bodied masses who consider themselves the public— doesn’t like what it sees.

Freaks was originally released in 1932; three years before the passing of the Nuremburg laws in Germany and 37 years after the first American eugenics law was passed. The contrast between the Freaks and their terrorizers, Cleopatra and Hercules, is stark and, to modern eyes, pointed. Cleopatra is an Aryan’s dream, as blonde and fit as she is disgusted by the physical “imperfection” which surrounds her. Hans, her victim and husband, is a wealthy, blond, German man rendered nothing in her eyes by virtue of his dwarfism.

Throughout the film, able-bodied characters casually question what, if any, rights the freaks have to live. Their very existence is framed as offensive. The climactic, karmic fate of Cleopatra echoes this: life as a freak is a fate worse than death. The film itself does not reconcile its focuses. In many ways, the film (which was heavily edited by the studio) is self-contradictory. The commitment to showing the quotidian humiliations of marginalization and the horror movie framing device sit uncomfortably together. The juxtaposition between the presentation of the performers as people and the casual way in which the more mainstream characters casually suggest their murders is deliberately uncomfortable—a clear indictment of the broader treatment of the disabled, from a time in which eugenics was arguably at its peak. It is obvious why it made contemporary audiences so uncomfortable; what is less clear is its enduring impact.

For the majority of its runtime, Freaks more closely resembles a soap opera than a classic of cult horror. Its narrative focus is far more centered on the interpersonal relationships of its characters: the cheating Hans; the gold-digging Cleopatra; the love story between the seal trainer, Venus, and loveable clown, Phroso. The film tips its hand to its true focus early. When faced with the trespassers, the landowner declines to evict them, recognizing the truth in their caregiver’s appeals to their shared humanity. Throughout the film, there are births, marriages, break ups and engagements; what there isn’t, is a lot of traditional horror. In fact, to those literate of genre conventions, the truly malignant and imposing force is introduced first: “a once beautiful woman” with whom we are not ultimately supposed to empathize. Once its runtime is complete, the staging is clear: the Freaks are not the monsters, they are the survivors. In art, as in life.

Able-bodied characters casually question what, if any, rights the freaks have to live. Their very existence is framed as offensive

Australian disability rights activist Stella Young argued that disability was not due to the physicality of the experience, but rather due to the fact that society is quite literally set up to exclude certain people. With few exceptions, accessibility is reserved for the able-bodied. That is a choice; a trap in which certain people are set up as contrary to the “normal” workings of a group or a place or a society due to nothing more than the needs of their bodies. They become, at best, spare parts—and, at worse, burdens which need to be dealt with. Humanity is universal to humans, yet we do not question excluding people from it.

Immediately upon his marriage to Cleopatra, Hans (who, before having his head turned, was planning to marry and leave the circus with his fiancé, Freida) is forced to endure one of the most viscerally humiliating scenes in cinema. In the fallout, he has a moment of realization: “Our wedding,” he reflects, “is a joke… and now I know how funny it is.” Immediately after this, his new wife starts poisoning him with her strong-man lover. This is the true horror of Freaks: there is indignity and there is humiliation, there are heroes and villains… and they are not who we want them to be.

There is a temptation to think that the bad times are in the past. Eugenics was for Nazis. Freak shows, barbaric and outdated, have righteously been terminated. But marginalization is an interesting phenomenon, one which is rarely so easy to stamp out. Cleopatra’s revulsion at being accepted into the community of freaks is telling. To be a freak is dangerous. She knows that; she’s the danger. And if you’re a freak, no one is coming to help you. They weren’t then; they aren’t now. During the strategic phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries around the world argued for herd immunity over life-saving precaution; in the UK, orders not to resuscitate people with disabilities were given to hospitals; eugenics-based laws are still on the books in the US; and to many, disability remains pejorative. Films like Midsommar, which feature visible difference and disability as nothing more than horrific flourishes, remain popular.

Freaks is not uncomfortable in the same way Gone with the Wind is uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable because a period piece about marginalized people should feel more antiquated. American Horror Story should have had to change more for it to resonate. Freaks should not star (far) more disabled actors than The Greatest Showman. The screening of The Last American Freakshow should not have been dependent on one executive’s comfort. Freaks should not remain one of the more recognizable, mainstream films showcasing disabled artists. 1932 should seem farther away. But it doesn’t; F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s stomach remains more important than the humanity of “freaks”.

Representation, good or bad, has a habit of self-replication. Commentary and critique act as an evolutionary process, sanding off the sharper corners and shaping our fictional caricatures into something more meaningful. Without Hattie McDaniel, Daniel Kaluuya would not have an Oscar—even if we’d all rather forget about Gone with the Wind.

When disabilities and, most importantly, those who have them, are not allowed to so much as appear on our screens, it reflects the conscious effort of society at large to exclude them. Erasure under the guise of kindness is still erasure—and without a light shining brightly on any minority community, the shadow of an unfriendly majority can get very cold and very, very dark. As we decide to “put the pandemic behind us”, how many companies are bothering to retain the distance working provisions which have allowed the disabled community unprecedented access to work, entertainment, and socializing?

Freaks’ legacy is important because the meaning of its significance remains largely unchanged. Disability is not horror. That still does not go without saying. For the majority of its runtime, Freaks holds a mirror up to show how deliberately and systematically certain kinds of people are labelled as outsiders and jettisoned from society. Its ending is an ableist undercutting of the project; its overshadowing of the film’s humanity is what’s truly horrific, ironically proving the original point. If Freaks is a horror, it’s because now, over 90 years later, so little has changed.