Freaks (1932)
98 %
Reviews Counted: 40 Fresh: 39 Rotten:1 Average Rating: 8.4/10
Consensus:
Time has been kind to this horror legend: Freaks manages to frighten, shock, and even touch viewers in ways that contemporary viewers missed.
Runtime: 66 mins
Synopsis: When released theatrically in 1932, FREAKS was met with near universal disgust by critics and audiences alike, lasting in theatres for only a short time in the states and banned in England. The film stars Harry Earles as Hans, a suave midget who belongs to the sideshow of a seedy circus and who... [More]
Genre: Horror/Suspense
Starring: Wallace Ford, Olga Baclanova, Leila Hyams, Roscoe Ates, Henry Victor
Director: Tod Browning
Screenwriter: Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon, Edgar Allan Woolf, Al Boasberg
Producer: Tod Browning
Screenwriter: Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon, Edgar Allan Woolf, Al Boasberg
Producer: Tod Browning
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
To the horror movie, a genre he helped create, he brought a taste for Victorian melodrama and an understanding, which he must have gained in the circus, for the isolated lives of weird and deformed outsiders.
Comment
09/24/07
Freaks is one of Browning's more consistently fine films, a landmark still worth seeing.
09/24/07
Top Critic
If the heart of the horror movie is the annihilating Other, the Other has never appeared with more vividness, teasing sympathy, and terror than in this 1932 film by Tod Browning.
09/24/07
Top Critic Top Critic
Absolutely spine chilling Tod Browning classic horror film. "We will make you one of us." Yike!
12/23/06
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer definitely has on its hands a picture that is out of the ordinary.
08/08/06
Top Critic
The movie's influences can be found in nearly every conceivable corner of modern film.
04/07/06
...drills into our hindbrain and jolts our atavistic response to the not-normal, then forces us to confront our prejudices and feel something -- revulsion, compassion, or surprise at the realization that those aren't mutually exclusive responses.
04/04/06
It's part of the film's brilliance that the lines between normal and abnormal, us and them, and even morality and immorality, are constantly blurred and reversed...
12/01/04
Ainda que Browning martele sem a menor sutileza sua mensagem ao longo de toda a projeção, o filme continua a impressionar graças ao seu elenco atípico e ao incômodo ato final.
11/17/04
...the movie was never meant to be a horror film; it was meant to be a character study and morality play.
08/31/04
It's a truly amazing film, not so much horrific as it is funny, touching and extraordinary; you'd be hard-pressed to find another film like it.
08/30/04
pretty pioneering for 1932, but modern desensitization to such things (hell, we have Paris Hilton on TV) mutes the freak-out effect almost completely
08/14/04
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