10 Awesome Horror Movies Under 80 Minutes
1. Freaks
Tod Browning's 1932 horror Freaks is one of the genre's most iconic and infamous offerings: a film one can scarcely believe got made almost an entire century ago considering the boldness of its subject matter and the empathy of its execution.
Though the title might suggest Freaks to be a cheap stop-and-gawk exercise, this is actually an at times shockingly powerful film about a group of circus performers who discover that a beautiful trapeze artist (Olga Baclanova) is attempting to seduce and murder one of their number (Harry Earles) for his inheritance.
This isn't to say that Browning always toes the line perfectly, and some may see Freaks as an exercise in exploitation no matter its compassionate throughline, but on the balance of its material, it is absolutely a humanistic feat of cinematic representation far ahead of its time.
At just 64 minutes Freaks flies by like an absolute zip, yet even so many years later still harbours an elemental power to shock and surprise, particularly in a climax which would feel envelope-pushing today, let alone in the pre-Code era.