"Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble. We accept her. One of us, one of us." You won't forget those words once you've sat through a screening of Tod Browning's strange, terrifying and (ahem) freakish movie, Freaks, whose tagline was legitimately: "Can a grown woman truly love a midget?" It's hard to know what genre Freaks really falls into, given the weird nature of the material, but there's no denying that there are some truly horrifying moments to be had, in and amongst the scenes of humour, drama and tragedy. Initially panned, Freaks has since been reappraised. Our story, set in travelling circus, explores the relationships between the assorted performers, many of whom are disabled - either mentally, physically, or both. In a controversial move, Browning opted to use actually deformed persons to assemble the "freaks" of the film's title. Running at a lean 64 minutes, Freaks genuinely stands alone in the horror pantheon as a singular obscurity - where oddness is concerned, very little compares. And in its thunderous, soaked, mud-splattered ending, you'll find one of the most nightmarish sequences in all of horror cinema.
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
