Freaks

Salvador Dali and all these people were contributing to those kind of movies.

But the first movie, the oldest movie that I know of that is just like, holy heck, this is crazy, is Freaks.

Okay.

1932, Todd Browning.

Yeah, sacroiliogenesis.

And I think I mentioned in the last podcast about a film called Freaks.

Yes.

In 1931, Todd Browning was the director.

My name is Kay Ross, she, her.

And for episode 100 of Unfilmable, we're talking about Freaks.

We're talking about Freaks, a movie directed by Todd Browning, written by Willis Goldbeck and Leon Gordon, and originally premiered in 1932.

Happy episode 100, Gary.

Yeah, 100 episodes.

This is technically a Gary pick, even though this is also kind of a special episode because this is a big movie.

Yeah.

We talked about doing it for a while, and Gwen was like, you guys have to do episode 100 on Freaks, right?

And then you have Island of Lost Souls the same year, where there's themes of bestiality, and Moreau gets hacked to death at the, with a bunch of surgical knives.

And then you have Freaks the same year.

Yeah, yeah.

[laughs]

You know, I mean, we get to Bride of Frankenstein and, and The Old Dark House, and especially with James Whale, you've got a guy who's injecting at least as much comedy as horror into the horror movies he's making.

And that's true of, you know, across a few directors.

For me, one of the standout ones, and, and 'cause I know we didn't cover this really in, or at least I don't believe so, in the Universal stuff, but Tod Browning's Freaks.

Mm-hmm.

We potentially have the sacrificing of great art.

Todd Browning's Freaks from 1932 was radically cut down to make it more palatable, as was 1997's Event Horizon and even 1931's Frankenstein.

Most or all of these versions forever lost to time.

From a studio perspective and a filmmaker's perspective, I've also seen it with adaptations where it almost seems like they're trying to tame the material.

It's just so... unqueer to me and this film and the book before it were genuinely queer masterpieces so the novel ends at midnight on Thursday October the 11th 1928 which is the exact day of the book's real world publication by Hogarth Press And there have been a number of adaptations of Orlando over the years, including on film Ulrika Ottinger's Freak Orlando, which incorporates elements of...

It's a kind of experimental film that incorporates elements of Orlando with Todd Browning's 1932 film Freaks, which I think we should talk about at some point.

Maybe not for the podcast.

I don't know what theme season Freak Orlando would be in.

Yeah.

It has, like, that kind of similar vibe, and it's, um, it's a mix of, um, Orlando and, uh, Todd Browning's Freaks.

They're like-

One of us.

a speculation that Carl Freund, the director of photography, did a lot of the actual directing of this movie because Todd Browning was kind of... indisposed, let's say, for a lot of it.

Was this after Freaks? I feel like...

No, this must have been before Freaks.

Freaks basically destroyed his career.

So I'm going to say this is before

Freaks.

But yeah, he had been having some issues and Carl Freund was the one who was doing a lot of the interesting camera movement and stuff.

Because Todd Browning was a silent film director for the most part.

That is fascinating.

there is like, um, the, the comparisons to, um, today where I like Legion in terms of like, um, you know, you think like, I'm trying to think of the right way to say this, like, um, you know, sort of like the, like, I guess prior to looking at this, either through Freaks or I was talking with Cameron about the video I did on some of the origins of some of this stuff in Appalachia with the Lynchburg story podcast that I did.

The overlap there is what was so...

It's like a million thoughts going through my head about this, but like, I think it's at one point your dad says, um, that he talks about like the, the sort of like, uh, fact factorization or like the, the sort of like the warehousing of disabled people.

It was very important that they made these films because they knew that they couldn't just come out and start doing this right away whenever they had the idea, right? Yeah.

So that was that was shocking to me.

I was wondering, like, if, you know, I'm sure Freaks was played in Germany.

I wonder if there was like a as we talked about Freaks.