The Unknown (1927)
Directed by Tod Browning
On the lam, criminal Alonzo hides in the circus as The Armless Wonder—a performer who uses his feet to hurl knives. Alonzo keeps the arms he really has concealed to hide his identity. Meanwhile, ringmaster's daughter Nanon has a phobia of being touched by men, but is romantically pursued by not only Alonzo but the strongman Malabar. Alonzo's desperation to remain with Nanon will only end in tragedy.
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What critics compared The Unknown to
A grisly, lurid cross between "Psycho" and the Tod Browning-Lon Chaney "The Unknown" — for its circus setting and slicing off of arms — it offers a mishmash of religious and Freudian symbolism amid torrential bloodshed topped with Fellini flourishes.
Browning himself was known for his long career of macabre and sinister movies like those he made with Lon Chaney: Outside the Law (1921), The Unholy Three (1925), The Road to Mandalay (1926), The Unknown (1927), London After Midnight (1927), West of Zanzibar (1928), and Where East Is East (1929).
Once recovered, Browning began making films that reflected his obsessions and, very possibly, his dysfunctions, marking his films (in particular Puppets, the great Freaks, and three of his eleven collaborations with Lon Chaney: The Unknown, the lost London After Midnight (an earlier flirtation with vampire folklore), and The Unholy Three) as transparent to a psychoanalytic approach while doing little to elevate the technical craft on display in his pictures from the level of earnest, flat, hackwork.