Abstract | Keywords | Export | Availability | Bookmark

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Freaks: A tale of love, deception, and retribution set among troupe of carnival sideshow performers, shunned by society because of their physical deformities. The unknown: An unrequited infatuation leads a circus knife-thrower on the run from the law into a troubled state, but when the circus owner discovers the desperate man's secret identity, things become markedly worse. The mystic: A confederacy of unsavory characters conspire to cheat an heiress out of her fortune by way of conducting fraudulent séances. The world is a carnival of criminality, corruption, and psychosexual strangeness in the twisted pre-Code shockers of Tod Browning. Early Hollywood's edgiest auteur, Browning drew on his experiences as a circus performer to create subversive pulp entertainments set amid the world of traveling sideshows, which, with their air of the exotic and the disreputable, provided a pungent backdrop for his sordid tales of outcasts, cons, villains, and vagabonds. Bringing together two of his defining works (The Unknown and Freaks) and a long-unavailable rarity (The Mystic), this cabinet of pre-Code curiosities reveals a master of the morbid whose ability to unsettle is matched only by his daring compassion for society's most downtrodden.

Sideshows --- Abnormalities, Human --- Outcasts --- Criminals --- Crime --- Swindlers and swindling --- Knife throwing --- Fugitives from justice --- Unrequited love --- Seances --- Heiresses