This macabre masterpiece of pre-Hays Code Hollywood is a staggering provocation from 1932, and a very potent reminder of cinema’s origin in the fairground tent. Director Tod Browning drew on his own experience in the circus for this bizarre black-comic horror-melodrama about a scheming trapeze artist who seduces a midget for his money, and tries to insinuate herself into the ranks of the circus “freaks”. These were played by people with genuine abnormalities, and the film is disturbing now in the way it was then. It probably outpaces Lynch’s The Elephant Man for shock, as it appears to us more in the spirit of the heartless showman, rather than any rational or compassionate observer. A unique film.
