Freaks (1932)
Directed by Tod Browning
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.
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What critics compared Freaks to
Once Howard’s plan becomes clear, Smith reveals a debt to Tod Browning’s 1932 masterpiece “Freaks,” the 1973 mad-herpetologist movie “Sssssss” and the recent “The Human Centipede,” among other predecessors.
Until it slips back into horror again, and an ending that plays a little like "Freaks."
Horror movies love the distortion and recombination of body parts, as in Frankenstein, Freaks and The Fly (to name just some F titles).
The denouement might just bring Tod Browning’s “Freaks” to mind.
On his way out of the theater, one critic compared it, not unfavorably, to Tod Browning’s masterpiece “ Freaks .”
Despite all its fanciful Buñuelesque surrealism and echoes of Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), it’s not that far removed from the pop-culture movies that surround it.
Watch "The Holy Mountain," and you'll see two naked women have their heads shaved; a man whose face is covered in flies; a cougar; the stem of a flower painfully and almost palpably plucked from the palm of a man's hand; children with their genitals painted green; a quadruple amputee (in a nod to Tod Browning's "Freaks") lighting a joint with the stumps of his arms and legs; a parade of soldiers carrying flayed lambs on crosses; a tourist happily taking pictures of the rape of his wife; songbirds emerging from the wounds of a dead student; and a tabletop re-staging of the conquest of Mexico enacted by lizards dressed as Aztecs and frogs dressed as missionaries and conquistadors.
There’s no inspiration from gothic art, another major influence, or even any attempt to borrow from Tod Browning’s Freaks , which seems like the best point of reference for this tale.
Burton’s inspiration for the circus is as much Tod Browning’s horror classic Freaks as the Disney original.
Oompa-Loompas -- the dwarfish assistants of Willy Wonka -- are name-dropped, and at one point Belfort and his board members break into a chant of "Gooble-gobble, we accept you, one of us," from Tod Browning's "Freaks."
There are witty references, too, to The Equalizer, Tod Browning’s Freaks, and Benihana.
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The lesson of Tod Browning's Freaks is that disability is the great democratizing factor, trumping race in matters of larceny and division--and Ray, at its best, balances entertainment with politics in the same deft, graceful way as Charles himself.
At first glance, the pairing of Ransom Riggs’s macabre 2011 coming-of-age novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and director Tim Burton would seem like a match made in movieland heaven: an Edward Gorey–inspired island of lost souls as filmed through the lens of old-school horror filmmakers, such as Tod Browning (1931’s Dracula and 1932’s Freaks).
Burton’s version of Riggs’ book, about children with alarming mutations and superpowers, is about what you’d expect: a tween-friendly version of Tod Browning’s shock-horror classic, “Freaks.”
An introduction like the wedding dinner from Tod Browning's popularly misunderstood Freaks segues into a set-piece in which Mama's children invite Aviva (now played by a morbidly obese black woman) to join them in singing songs.
From its grotesque portrait of a household of born-again Christians ("Freaks" without the compassion) to its casting of an obese girl as one of the Avivas, "Palindromes" reeks of Solondz's trademark nastiness, reveling in a childish ability to shock the viewer.
Their production numbers are both funny and acutely uncomfortable: casting actors with real disabilities is nothing new, but collecting them into a horrendously tacky showbiz exercise can't help bringing to mind Tod Browning's 1932 circus story Freaks.
Released in 1932, "Freaks" has been accepted in the classic-film canon for decades, and Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci paid loving homage in "The Dreamers" (2004), by having his characters chant the film's most famous line: "We accept you.
No sooner does a character mention or contemplate À bout de souffle, Bande à part, Freaks, or some other classic than clips from the movie appear.
I love how they are able to find in the cinema a set of moral standards � a clip from Freaks demonstrates their sense of camaraderie as much as one from Mouchette demonstrates a sense of moral consequence or Marlene Dietrich�s Blonde Venus song and dance routine keys them into the exoticism of sex.
Inside, these borderline incestuous siblings admit Matthew into their freaky psychosexual playpen (complete with interpolations from Tod Browning's Freaks), where he explores the connection (or lack thereof) between uninhibited sex and existential freedom (a recurring Bertolucci motif).
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The first half of the film, when Fenix is a boy, is a surreal circus story that owes a debut to Browning's masterpiece "Freaks" (1932) as well as to such lurid thrillers as "Circus of Horrors" (1960).
On paper, Jodorowsky's vision seems drawn equally from the works of Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock (most blatantly Psycho ), and perhaps incidentally, Tod Browning's Freaks , but the effect of his kaleidoscopic vision never feels culled from any cloths not of his own making.
Santa Sangre is as familiarly esoteric as Jodorowsky’s other efforts, but it possesses very pronounced influences, including Psycho , Freaks (Tod Browning is Jodorowsky’s cinematic father), The Who’s Tommy, The Invisible Man, and even Fellini’s partiality to the circus.
And so we have film noir, horror, and grotesquerie all at play here—a melding of 1945’s Detour, Crimson Peak, and Tod Browning’s Freaks.
The first half is something of a Horatio Alger story fused with Tod Browning’s creepy 1932 tale, “Freaks.”
But Stan is never truly embraced as “one of us” — that oft-quoted mantra of Tod Browning’s “Freaks,” the reigning classic of this milieu, against which “Nightmare Alley” must inevitably be judged — and for good reason.