[psycho d]

Freaks (1932). This discomfiting classic from Tod Browning cannot be labeled a horror movie proper, but more a drama whose characters are deemed horrible to contemplate. Far from exploitative, Freaks works instead to reveal that these humans, relegated to a sideshow, are just as normal as everyone else. In fact, they might be more community-minded than many "normal" people, as will be revealed by their "code." With science today, human disfigurements, oddities, are much the rarer. This leads to an interesting trick of the mind as it searches to find evidence of cgi for scenes that seem too bizarre to be awarded as genuine. Freaks serves a greater purpose as a documentary of a bygone era, of the circus lives of human aberrations that today's world deems politically incorrect to an exponential degree. Maybe this is fair, but this film divulges that these freaks seem perfectly content in their community, where they feel at home with themselves, and where their special condition can actually be a profitable affair. The story itself was classic simple, but the canvas upon which it plays out is compelling. With the use of actual circus performers for many of the roles, the acting ranges from pretty good to deplorable, which by no means detracts from its overall puissance. In fact, it might just humanize these characters all the more. Again, while not a horror flick proper, at least to this simpleton, the ending is one that cannot but be indelibly burned into the nightmarish recesses of the mind, where the characters that we have come to empathize with suddenly admit to our childish specters of human monstrosity by reverting to a mud-stained enterprise that only the gelatinous soils of Hell could produce.
Genruk