cinehunch
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
01
Why this pick
Tod Browning again pairs carnival-world strangeness with deep sympathy for a performer whose identity and desire become dangerously entwined; its compact, lurid melodrama has Freaks’ unsettling intimacy.
02
Why this pick
A visually lavish silent melodrama about a visibly marked outsider exploited as spectacle, balancing gothic unease, tenderness, and a fierce sense of injustice.
03
Why this pick
Its black-and-white Victorian atmosphere and sideshow setting extend Freaks’ insistence that the supposedly ordinary audience can be more cruel than the person displayed.
04
Why this pick
This macabre circus-set nightmare shares Freaks’ fascination with performance, bodily difference, insular communities, and grotesque imagery, while making the emotion more feverish and surreal.
05
Why this pick
A savage, theatrical tale of rival circus performers, driven by damaged desire and escalating brutality; it channels a similarly carnivalesque world where spectacle curdles into horror.
Finding the atmosphere, tension and little details that made this one stay with you.
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01 / THE STORY
The film opens with a sideshow barker drawing customers to visit the sideshow. A woman looks into a box to view a hidden occupant and screams. The barker explains that the horror in the box was once a beautiful and talented trapeze artist. The central story is of this conniving trapeze artist named Cleopatra, who seduces and marries the sideshow midget Hans after learning of his large inheritance. Cleopatra conspires with circus strongman Hercules to kill Hans and inherit his wealth. At their wedding reception, Cleopatra begins poisoning Hans' wine but drunkenly kisses Hercules in front of Hans, revealing her affair. Oblivious, the other "freaks" announce that they accept Cleopatra in spite of her being a "normal" outsider: they hold an initiation ceremony in which they pass a loving cup around the table while chanting, "We accept her, we accept her. One of us, one of us. Gooba-gobble, gooba-gobble". Cleopatra's mean-spirited amusement at this ceremony turns to fear and anger after Hercules jokes that the freaks plan to turn her into one of them. She mocks the freaks, tosses the wine in their faces and drives them away before berating Hans and drunkenly parading him around on her shoulders like a child. The humiliated Hans realizes that he has been played for a fool and rejects Cleopatra's attempts to apologize, but then he falls ill from the poison.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
Roscoe
Angelino
The Armless Woman
The Human Skeleton
Phroso
Schlitze
Venus
Cleopatra
