Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (Freddie Francis, 1968)

How do you set about fighting vampires if you happen to be an atheist? That's the central dilemma of this fourth film in Hammer's Dracula franchise. It's an oddly gentle movie for standard vampiric fright fare. Oh, you get your bloodlettings and wanton cruelty (it does star Christopher lee, after all), yet when it's all over the lingering impression is of an idealistic good nature, almost a gee-whizness concerning the good will between rival systems of belief. The world could use more of that.

The dilemma above is faced by Paul, a forthright young man in love with the niece of a disapproving Monsignor. Paul is an atheist, and when the Monsignor tells him he admires honesty Paul makes the mistake of telling the truth about his convictions. It causes a schism between everyone at just the wrong moment, as the Monsignor has unwittingly gotten on the bad side of the newly resurrected Dracula. For revenge Dracula targets the Monsignor's niece, Maria., as his next conquest.

There are a few of things that are slightly off about Dracula Has Risen, and Paul is one of them. He's a nice guy, sure enough, highly personable and no character flaws. He's an earnest and forthright fellow, wishing offense to no one but eager for “Truth”, which he seeks in books. It's his upbeat persona and interactions that give the movie a G-rated feel in spite of the violence involved (bizarrely, the movie has even been granted a G rating by the MPAA). Paul seems displaced in tone and also in time. He and his drinking buddies come of as anachronistic in their manners and ideals (and their hairstyles...) DHRFtG was made to appeal directly to the youth audience at a time of spreading protest among college students - 1967 had seen protests against the Vietnam War, and within months of Risen's release in February '68 those youth protests would spread worldwide to become the “Year of Barricades”. It was a generational conflict, youth shaking up and shaking off the institutions of their elders.

Yet Dracula Has Risen is not an angry film, far from it. The generational conflict is represented here as that of atheist Paul and the film's most learned man, the Monsignor – who rejects Paul the moment he learns of Paul's convictions. To this point in the film the Monsignor has been shown to be a somewhat affable man but one who will bully and coerce to enforce his views. A visit to the discussion boards on IMDb brings up conversations in which people see his hostility to Paul as a sour surprise. Actually, though, it isn't nearly negative enough to be accurate to the period – another anachronism, the entire community shows the film's Paul far more tolerance than a real-life counterpart would have met. In reality Paul would have been a scandal regardless what a swell guy he was.

Even so, Paul really is presented as scrubbed so clean he's nearly glowing pink. Don't alienate the core audience! His character never hints of anger or rebellion, not even at odds with society at large. Paul's boss loves the boy, Maria's mother asks him to leave only our of deference to the Monsignor who cares for the family but is clearly pained to do so. Paul's friends are as inoffensive as he is, with the possible exception of the barmaid who chafes a little resentfully at romantic boundaries. Essentially: what conflict? The world's a happy get-along place! If DHRFtG is taking pains to be a part of the movement and not just being opportunistic, then it's the voice urging calm and understanding amidst passions. We can work together. 

So how does Dracula fit into this? Erm – well, yeah. Exactly. I mean, the movie isn't thematically deep, the subtexts are there but they float on the surface like oil, never quite convincing that they are organic to the whole. Dracula is the catalyst for reconciliations. Furthering both the faith angle and the message of cooperation, Dracula has taken as his servant a fallen priest suffering a crisis of faith and conscience. Contrast this with his direct opponent, the Monsignor who must rely upon a disbeliever to defeat evil. If the movie is ultimately a little unsatisfying in resolving these themes, it's still full of tantalizing little provocations.

Not the film is all hope and joy: Christopher Lee is back as wild as ever. I don't recall seeing look quite so cadaverous before – not Lee himself but the makeup, which has taken a more sallow hue. Nothing dead about his performance, though, he's even vicious to the horses that take his carriage. The only thing that can stop him flat is the flavorless dialog he's given. Honestly, the actor is a lot happier when his vampire is snarling.

Freddie Francis replaces Terence Fisher as director, and he does a fine job of keeping things lively if tonally awkward (e.g. there's a bit of business with a porcelain doll pushed off a bed by one of Dracula's victims – succinct but unsubtle). Early in the movie I was concerned that the look of the picture would be a bit dull, as the natural lighting threatened to undo any atmospherics with the Count's castle, or it's surroundings, or with a profaned church where a bit of grue is discovered, but Francis has a new trick up his sleeve. Whenever Dracula appears on screen he's shot with a filter that goes deep amber in a halo around the center of the screen. The effect is that of a miasma of sickness or evil surrounding the count. Or even more, perhaps, late in the movie I was struck by the way the yellow seen in a fireplace matched the filtered shots, and how it reflects the religious bent of the movie – perhaps the yellow filter suggests the suffocating nearness of hell itself. Not inapt, as Dracula has already been conflated with the Prince of Darkness if only by title. As the movie progresses its lighting becomes more and more dreamlike with colors intensifying, mostly by an increasing use of gels.

Adding to the sense of surreality are some anomalies. In the city of Kleinenberg, where Dracula tracks down the Monsignor, our principle characters have a habit of getting around by rooftop rather than by street. By the end of the movie all of the characters are traversing the roofs. It's absurd, but it has an endearing dream logic to it. Similarly the cellar of the inn where Dracula secretly takes up residence is ridiculously extensive for a meager establishment with a cramped bar and closetlike rooms. The guests and servants can hardly get around upstairs but down below are more spacious work and storage areas that include a spooky Gothic structure that must be well out from under the building. It could have no possible function except as an invitation to furtive evil monsters. Personally, I find the dreamlike aspects of Dracula has Risen are ultimately the most endearing thing about it.

5 Short Films by Shinya Tsukamoto

The moment his father brought home an 8mm movie camera, young Shinya Tsukamoto appropriated it as his own and began experimenting. Inspired by the kaiju (monster) movies he loved, the first proper movie he made with the home camera was about a man who becomes a monster and destroys Tokyo. Film became a passion for him and he continued making movies throughout his school years recruiting everyone he could find including his older brother. Despite the budget he had to work with, his movies were often feature-length with fully developed scripts. These he would show to various school classes. Eventually Tsukamoto became involved in school theater, and on leaving school formed his own shortlived stage company. His officially recognized body of work numbers eight movies before the more widely known Phantom of Regular Size.

Phantom of Regular Size (1986, 18 minutes)

More correctly translated as Monster of Regular Size, meaning human-sized monster, Phantom was the rough sketch of an idea that would be fleshed out to become Tetsuo the Iron Man. This was Tsukamoto finding his voice through experimentation, content to let story and narrative slide. 

  

The Adventures of Denchu Kozo (1987, 45 minutes)

 Into every generation an Electric Rod Boy is born: one boy in all the wold, a chosen one. He alone will have the power to bring light to a world in darkness. He is the Electric Rod Boy.

Some five or six years before Buffy, high-schooler Kai was the chosen one fighting punk rock vampires in this short movie that fuses early music video style to manga, Back to the Future (or maybe the Terminator), Godzilla, and Plymptoons. It's a marvel of demented editing, stop motion, and no-budget ingenuity. It's also the most pure fun of anything Shinya Tsukamoto has made, a bright comedy about a dark future.

Kai is an odd child, picked on at school for his deformity: an electric rod growing out of his back. Let me clear something up about that, it's not a lighting rod – not some short little stick. No, it's a freakin' street pole! Sharing his shirt collar and growing to tower over him. That's the kind of movie you're dealing with: one in which, during a fight, a stuffed toy dog flies into the room and vomits stuffing for no apparent reason.

Kai's schoolmate Momo is sweet on him. She's also a fighter and rescues him from bullies. One day while he shows off his prototype for a time machine, he is suddenly whisked to the future by another machine appearing out of nowhere. Arriving twenty-five years into the future he finds the world has been conquered by vampires who have enslaved humanity. They have devices that keep the world shrouded in darkness for short periods of time. They are about to make that state permanent with an amplifier that uses an untouched female virgin as a battery. Awaiting Kai's arrival is a foe of the vampires, a mysterious woman who wears a photo album on her head like a professor's mortarboard. She tells Kai that he is the chosen one who is meant to defeat the vampires.

While there's not much meaning to any of this it's got a fully developed storyline that's easy enough to follow if you're quick enough to keep up with the visuals – not an easy task. t's brisk and funny, and hard to take your eyes off of. Kai is a polite kid, not goofy but engagingly awkward, and there's a gentle bond between Kai and his future mentor. (Kei Fujiwara in a much more substantial role than she would play as the subway attacker in Tetsuo). Among other signature likes, Tsukamoto works his love of giant monsters into the movie with a giant vampire looming over a miniature tokyo while spewing atomic breath ala Gojira. First time I've ever seen dai-kaiju that was a gorgeous nude woman. There's also a running sendup of the archetypal masculine hero of cinema: Kai is anything but the he-man type yet the dialog is taken up with double-ententes about how the power of his rod is going to save the world.

Tokage (2003, 50 minutes)

Tokage was commissioned by television network NHK for a series in which the works of famous Japanese authors would be narrated on film, as captured by noteworthy directors. Tsukamoto was asked to direct the short story Lizard, by Banana Yoshimoto.

Lizard concerns a love affair between two healers who are unable to heal their own psychic wounds. The narrator is a counselor for disturbed children. He has fallen in love with a profoundly sad woman nicknamed Lizard who longs for oblivion. Lizard has an uncanny ability to diagnose and treat other people's illnesses. The story follows their mutual fumbling towards the point where they can share with each other their most personal stories. The relationship – two depressives in despair, who seek mutual healing – looks forward to Vital, which Tsukamoto would direct the next year. So do some of the themes raised by the story, like psychic abilities and the question of soul independent of body though these are lightly touched upon. Properly, the tale is about empathy and the wounds left by trauma. Also anticipating Vital, it's one of the director's bleakest works.

Shot on hi-def video, Tokage follows actress Ryo as she reads Yoshimoto's text. Our first sight of her is in a bedroom, and then the camera follows through through a succession of rooms in what we soon realize is an abandoned building. As the story unfolds and the two lovers reveal more of their inner selves, the rooms Ryo visits show more alarming states of disrepair until we find ourselves in a cafeteria still festooned with the streamers that once saw a celebration. Tsukamoto films under a variety of light sources, primarily natural – they filmed it in a single continuous shot at sundown.

Jewel Beetle (2005, 22 minutes)

Named for a beetle whose lustrous wings make it desirable for ornamentative purposes, Jewel Beetle concerns a yakuza leader and the mistress he keeps far away from society. The relationshoip is founded on sexual fulfillment but the two are genuinely fond of each other. The woman (never named) is restless as she is not allowed to wander away from her remote cabin. The 'Old Man' (as she calls him) fears for her future should he be killed, which is becoming likely, so he introduces her to his young protege. 

There are three sex scenes in the movie: the first is a fully clothed interlude between the yakuza head and the woman, that speaks of the playfulness of long familiarity; the second is again fully clothed, tender, a tentative moment between the mistress and the young man, a less-than-chaste kiss with the camera close and intimate on their sweat-dewed faces, chaperoned by the sound of rain; the third is tension-relieving naked animal pleasure. I wonder whether this might be the first depiction of female ejaculation in a non-pornographic film. All of the scenes of the woman inside her cabin are caressed in blue, purple, and pink lighting. Jewel Beetle echoes A Snake of June in that the tale is about a woman who comes to realize that she owns her own sexuality and can choose autonomy.

Jewel Beetle was Shinya Tsukamoto's contribution to an anthology film titled Fîmeiru (Female), featuring works by Ryuichi Hiroki, Suzuki Matsuo, Miwa Nishikawa, and Tetsuo Shinohara.

Haze (2005, 49 minutes)

Haze is an exercise in extreme claustrophobia and paranoia, in that order. A man awakens in the dark, in a maximally confined space that offers only the slightest options for movement. He has no memory of who he is or how he got there. When it becomes apparent that the space is a maze, he attempts to find his way out amidst various hazards like pipes that grate along his teeth, nails protruding from the floor, and automated hammers that beat at him. All the while, he tortures himself with speculation: is he in hell? Has war broken out and he is in the hands of some enemy force? Has he been kidnapped by some rich sadist? The narrative is as closed in as the set, a limited film but a harrowing one that's impossible to look away from. Grimy, nasty, and terrifying, Haze is a darker exploration of an idea Tsukamoto first visited in Vital.

I have not yet seen either the short film that was entered in “Venice 70: Future Reloaded” or "Ayashiki bungô kaidan".

Vital (Shinya Tskamoto, 2004)

Deconstructing Vital to discover its meaning is a lot like dissecting a body in an attempt to find the physical mechanisms of the soul. (There, I've found my first incision.)

(caveat, somewhat spoilery review)

Hiroshi awakens from a coma following a car crash. He has no memory of his identity or his life. His parents tell him as gently as they can that he had burnt out, lost his vital spark. Once he had planned to be a doctor, or an artist. Later he will leanr that he had a girlfriend, Ryoko, a beautiful young woman with a tattoo of a blue bird on her arm. She was in the crash and died soon after.

Inspired by one of his old med school textbooks, Hiroshi re-enrolls and thus acquires a pathology class assignment and a new girlfriend. With the new girlfriend, Ikumi, he fails to connect emotionally. In contrast, his studies light up his mind. The class will examining four cadavers over the course of four months. The one assigned to Hiroshi has a tattoo of a blue bird on her arm.

Shinya Tsukamoto's career to date had been a series of meditations on reconciling the organic physicality of the body with the soul-crushing artificiality of its modern city home. Vital marks a radical advance in his vision. The movie begins with shots of a zombified Hiroshi in the city, shot with cold blue color timing. This will be familiar to anyone who knows the director's work. From there, though, the movie takes an unexpected turn inward, toward spirituality. This is a new theme for Tsukamoto but a natural one given the humanism inherent in his previous work, especially the journey of conscience made by the doctor in Gemini.

Hiroshi begins to recover memories of Ryoko...except that some of them don't feel like memories, or dreams. Turning to her grieving parents, he learns that Ryoko had lost her own essence of life, the two had shared that one thing in common. For example, she had never danced. When Hiroshi imagines he is with her, she dances. She smiles, she laughs...and when he says it's time to go home, she weeps in panic. When they are together, it is in on unspoiled beaches in verdant locales, unlike anything in Hiroshi's day-to-day life. Are these memories? Is he imagining these moments? Or is it possible that he shares a link with Ryoko's spirit after her death that cannot be separated by the bounds of body? Ryoko says that she doesn't feel real anymore, like her existence has become a dream reality.

There is a central image in Vital that I think marks the whole film. Hiroshi meets Ryoko at an abandoned building Clearly visible surrounding the ruins is that lush verdant paradise. Within the building is a massive chunk of earth and rock: nature both within and without the body. It's an image straight out of Tarkovsky.

This isn't the first time Tsukamoto had gone green, but it's his most effective use of natural setting so far. These scenes are colorful warm, sensual, flowing with ease and comfort, solace and joy. Life. The director has also opted for a more naturalisitc depiction of Tokyo: though still cold and blue, it is no longer the exaggerated sterile dystopia of earlier films...just dreary. It's clearly inhabited by life and the attendant decay. Likewise, the med school setting is in a constant cold and sickly green light. Breaking this up, we often see Hiroshi bathed in red light when he's immersing in inner turmoil. Some of Tsukamoto's signature freneticism is on display, like handheld shots of smokestacks or Ryoko dancing, but they appear in rare bursts braking out of a repressed funk. Chu Ishikawa gifts the film with tender quietude, seldom breaking into industrial beats.

There are extensive scenes of dissections in which Tsukamoto can indulge his own background in illustrative art and a flirtation with wanting to become a doctor...for some of us, not easy to watch. To be honest, I'm plenty squeamish. It helps that Tsukamoto has decided to render his bodies in plastic, to look like physical manifestations of the beautiful anatomical renderings done in pencil – there's not a hint of gooeyness, of bodily fluids. Well – not visually, anyway. One scene has a memorable upkeep of sploshy sounds as Hiroshi works. We watch Hiroshi, Ikumi watches Hiroshi, Hiiroshi has eyes only for Ryoko's body. 

Ikumi has a story, though it isn't the central one. The MFM triangle that usually forms the structure of a Tsukamoto movie is inverted for a FMF formation, but it isn't one of equal sides. Ikumi at least has more spark inside her than Hiroshi does, but it is on danger of going out – the suicide of a professor she's been intimate with leaves her unmoved, and she discusses her lack of response as if unsure whether to be concerned for herself. I'm still studying her story to figure out its place in the story. To be honest, this is one of the director's movies I visit least though I feel it's among his best. Vital is a movie informed by the process of grieving, a search for solace and closure I'm too close to. It is a movie that seeks not joy but peace. For Tsukamoto, it's exploratory surgery.

Zinda Laash aka The Living Corpse (Khwaza Sarfraz, 1967)

You've been here often enough to know how it goes: Jonathon Harker travels to a forbidding manse where he is greeted by a noble he doesn't realize is a vampire. At night he meets one or more of the vampire's seductive female concubines. Then she breaks into a musical number.

As an adaptation there isn't much to say of Zinda Laash except that it's quite good. It's modeled directly on Hammer's 1958 Horror of Dracula, liberally appropriating some sequences shot-for-shot as well as tracks from James Bernard's score. Those lifts are supplemented by a deranged range of musical selections that include nightclub songs, Western saloon piano, the Barber of Seville, and La Cucaracha. Some of it misses the mark tonally, but somehow altogether it works to infuse the movie with a sense of fresh energy. Shot in luminous b&w, Zinda Laash is pretty to look at and well paced. Like Horror of Dracula, Zinda Laash pares back the need for sfx – no wolf, bat, or mist transformations. Harking back to the original novel, the vampire's feeding of the kidnapped baby to an underling makes its second appearance in a Dracula adaptation. Not that the moment is explicit, bitings are discreetly staged and edited. Much more effective are the shadows and webs of the vampire's home.

One effect I found notable was a transitional fade that occurs two or three times. You know, that old technique used for, say, werewolf transformations? The camera focuses on the actor's face, a few frames are shot, and then makeup is added in increments before shooting a few more frames. In Zinda Laash the difference between a vampire and a human is a matter of fairly subtle makeup – no Joss Whedon vampfaces here. Basically, when an actor changes from human to vampire, they just look a little less restrained of nature. So, when you see a transitional fade in this movie you're seeing an obvious fade with little or no obvious difference: the actor, a fade, and the actor looking the same. The effect calls attention to itself, and the first time it threw me. Then I realized that you don't need to see the change, the fact of the fade itself clues you in that there's been one. Subtle and brilliant.

The differences are mostly cultural: the supernatural horror aspects are kept to a minimum, which necessitates a prologue in which we learn that the Dracula character was a scientist named Tabani who vampirized himself with a potion gone wrong. No one waves any crosses about, there's not much talk of religion...and every so often the women break into song and dance (even the climactic fight sequence is choreographed to look like a dance, though I suspect this was unintentional). That's just par for the course with Lollywood (Lahore-based) cinema, a film is incomplete without musical numbers. Similar to Drakula Istanbul'da, Zinda Laash transplants the tale not only geographically but temporally as well to modern times. We've seen Dracula driving a car in other versions, but somehow it seems fundamentally wrong to see him driving a car. The styles on display are Western in attire and furnishings, and there's a strong sense of '60s youth “scene” about the movie.

Also interesting are the women of Zinda Laash. They never show much skin but are all highly sensual, not least when they dance. Human, vampire, and in transitions between they move like flames and drape themselves over the furniture with the silky fluidity of some of their costumes. Their looks smolder. Even in innocence they radiate energy, as in a beachside number. Still human, Shabnam (the Lucy character) waiting for Dracula is the most outright expression of sexual longing to appear in any Dracula movie to that date and for some time to come.

It's kind of fascinating to watch Zinda Laash thread its way between suggestive behavior and the strict moral purity imposed by Pakistan's dictatorship of the day. The censors were apoplectic that a horror film had even been made in the first place (Pakistan's second, the first being 1964's Deewana, a version of The Invisible Man). Cuts were made to some of the more provocative dance moves, and the film was finally okayed for release only upon the promise by the producers that they would never, ever again make a horror movie. Zinda Laash was released with an 'adults only' certificate, guaranteeing that everyone wanted to see it. It was a hit. Pakistani theaters were well used to horror imports, but this was their own and nigh forbidden to boot.

I saw it a month ago on YouTube and have happily added Mondo Macabro's 2003 DVD release under the alternate title “The Living Corpse” to my collection. Having only recently been a lost film, this boasts a beautifully restored image that suffers only a brief drunken wobble in one scene. It's a sweet package that includes a commentary track , new interviews the filmmakers, a clip-heavy look at Asian horror cinema, a song cut from the film, galleries, and trailers. The movie itself is in Urdu with optional English subs.

Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932)

Freaks is a movie I think of as a Voight-Kampff test. If you're not familiar with Blade Runner or the Philip K. Dick novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep', I'll explain: administering a Voight-Kampff is how you tell a human being from an android replica. The test consists of a battery of questions and proposals designed to elicit an empathetic response. The android will not have genuine emotional responses – in theory, an android has no capacity for empathy.

On its original theatrical run in 1932 and for decades after, audiences and critics alike failed that test spectacularly.

Made and marketed as a horror film, Freaks is a colorful tale of the life of a circus troupe drawn from writer/director Tod Browning's personal recollections. We see the performers' loves, their jealousies, their rivalries and personal disputes, the bonds and the enmities they form. The great bulk of the movie is light, jovial. Emphasis is placed on the various romances (most of them frustrated in one way or another) that occur within the troupe. Some of it is daring for the era, including some risque dialog that caught the censors unaware. Phroso the Clown and Venus are taken with each other, but Venus is unable to elicit a warm physical response from Phroso (“You shoulda seen me before my operation”, he says without further elucidation). Strongman Hercules is a crude Alpha-male brute who dallies with all the camp's women. He's attracted to the show's hermaphrodite but can't admit it and so is often hostile. She seems to be attracted to him as well, but never speaks it.  The circus' owner wants to marry Violet but can't get a moment alone with her, being that she is a conjoined twin. Her sister Daisy and the owner don't get along one bit. Frieda is devoted to Hans but Hans has eyes only for trapeze artist Cleopatra.  Cleopatra plays off Hans' love in order to get closer to his money.  Hans and Frieda are little people, whom Cleo despises along with all other “freaks”.

Here is where audiences freaked: the cast is an even mix of normal-bodied folk, paraplegics and quadriplegics, gaffs (performers who fake physical abnormality), little people, microcephalics (“pinheads”), hermaphrodites, and others with genuine physical malformations of many kinds from the incredibly thin to “bird people”. That alone made “normal” audiences uncomfortable. Imagine their revulsion when Browning upped the ante by presenting the “freaks” as not only human beings but beings with sexual impulses.

This is what the critics had to say when confronted by such humanity: Script opined that the film could only appeal to “the morbidly curious and psychically sick whose libidos are stimulated by contemplating the sex lives of abnormalities and monsters”. According to the Boston Herald, “Any who enjoy watching the pitiful grotesque mistakes of nature may behold them in 'Freaks' (...) the sadistically cruel plot savors nearly of perversion”. Time magazine deemed the sideshow performers to be “subhuman animals”.

Isn't society lovely? There is an instinct we all know for social survival that could be summed up as “pick on the freak”. It works like this: to be accepted by a dominant society and thus have their protection, you must publicly hurt someone scorned by that group, someone deemed lesser or undesirable. By doing so you demonstrate your own worthiness to belong. It's ugly and cruel, and we all learn it at school either by doing it or having it done to us. Pick on the freak. Browning knows it well and cannily provides a stark example in Freaks when Hercules (recently abandoned by Venus) now woos Cleopatra. The two espy the hermaphrodite (she is never named) looking on at Hercules with heartbroken eyes. Remember, Hercules is attracted to her. In front of Cleo, though, he has to demonstrate that he's 'normal' and so shows off his masculinity by delivering the hermaphrodite a vicious black eye. Cleo responds with delighted laughter.

Bringing out the worst in each other, the pair get darker from there and so does the film. Cleo marries Hans for his money. Actress Olga Baclanova essays the role of Cleo with an air of undisguised loathing for her circumstances, having to abide the presence of so many contemptible colleagues. In the film's most celebrated scene, a wedding banquet is held at which Cleo gets drunk, literally from champagne and figuratively from her success in so easily fooling her little rube. While the troupe celebrates, mostly oblivious to her as she is to them, she proceeds to demean him openly, mocking him for his size and condescending to his apparent stupidity. Watch the way she reacts when Hercules points her attention to the sideshow performers drinking a toast to her that they accept her: “One of us! One of us!” The horror! The effrontery! The sheer, nasty insult – Cleo accepted as equals by filth! Baclanova plays a beautiful transition from boisterous hilarity to stuporous incomprehension to outrage.

Further betrayals sow an anger throughout the troupe, poisoning them all. Plans are made, vigils are kept, until one night as the caravan makes it's way through a stormy night (it has to be a storm at night, doesn't it?) varying bands form and attack each other. The sequence is a veritable lesson in filmcraft by Browning and his crew, as is the wedding feast. I've hardly even mentioned the talent on display...gloriously shot and lit, captured by a camera as fluid as the ones in Dracula were not, and set in a studio-created circus grounds that are not just convincing but inviting as a living microcosm. It's easy to immerse and lose oneself here. The script is sharp, perhaps even acidic given what's known of excised material – the censors removed some thirty minutes of material, and more was scripted but never shot. The finale involved a castration, no longer extant.

Even today, some are squeamish about that finale. Some find Browning's treatment of the circus folk to be exploitative, ambivalent...they see the sideshow people crawling beneath the carriages, wet with mud and shot in the visual language of horror cinema, and they see Browning proposing the circus folk as monstrous. In Tod Browning's reckoning, everyone ends up in the mire including the 'normals'. In 1932, Motion Picture Daily wrote that one can “not simultaneously capitalize on human misfits and pretend to pity them”. It is at least a recognition of basic human dignity, but still a failure to comprehend what's right there on the screen. When the hour of reckoning comes, it is the normal-bodied and “freak” alike who attack, or act to defend others, their courses decided not by their infirmities but by the strengths of their characters, side by side as equals and companions. In Browning's reckoning, lack of human empathy lowers us all into the mire.