Freaks (1932)

Freaks (1932)
A circus' beautiful trapeze artist agrees to marry the leader of side-show performers, but his deformed friends discover she is only marrying him for his inheritance.

Director Tod Browning took the exceptional step of casting real people with deformities as the eponymous sideshow "freaks," rather than using costumes and makeup. Browning had been a member of a traveling circus in his early years, and much of the film was drawn from his personal experiences.

Beginning in the early 1960s, Freaks was rediscovered as a counterculture cult film, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the film was regularly shown at midnight movie screenings at several movie theaters in the United States. In 1994, Freaks was selected for preservation in the United States National Film
Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Director: Tod Browning
Writer: Clarence Aaron 'Tod' Robbins (story)
Stars: Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams and Olga Baclanova

16mm/B&W/Sound/64 min.