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.

Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931)

A positive review of a movie should be more than just a laundry list of refutations of other people's criticisms. It should, I think, point out what works about the film. Browning's Dracula is one of those I have trouble writing about because I always end up with the former, while never quite being able to put my finger on the latter. It's a deservedly well-loved movie, and it has just as many detractors as fans. Strangely, it's the critics who best express what they think doesn't work...I'm unsure whether I've ever read a take on it that captures exactly why it does work. Maybe there's nothing exact about it.

In fairness I should start not with the movie itself but by acknowledging the film that should have been. Universal had been planning a more epic and more faithful movie starring Lon Chaney in the title role (I don't know which part of that is the more mouthwatering). It's our great loss that it fell apart. Chaney died and the studio changed hands, and the project was scrapped in favor of a scaled-down production based not on Stoker's book but one of the more popular stage adaptations. Maybe the critics are right when they say Browning lost all enthusiasm. No one really knows what his thoughts were, we're all left guessing.

I grew up on Dracula ('31) and had a child's ability to accept that he was a monster simply because...well, just because. He's well-spoken, well-dressed, exceptionally well-mannered, urbane...the perfect dinner guest provided you're not the dinner. Still, you already know going in that he's a blood-drinking creature that isn't really human and isn't really alive either. It's just one of those things you learn early on, Dracula is a culturally known quantity the world over and you know this before ever seeing one of these movies. Some jaded horror viewers may need something more, but to a kid an undead blood-drinker is a lot. Children have a way of honing in on a concept whether the frills are there or not.

Some of those childhood movies no longer work for me, sad to say. Not so with Browning's Dracula, if anything it's become much more frightening to me in adulthood. When I was a child Dracula himself scared me whenever he was onscreen. Now it's the whole movie that creeps me out. It's no longer just a film about a monster. It's about keeping a death vigil over people you can't save, about watching someone you love fall under the sway of corruption and change into someone who no longer cares about you. The ghoulish factor provided by the literal vampirism completes the chill of nightmarishness, but it isn't the only one.

Nightmarish is exactly the right word. Have you ever tried examining a bad dream upon waking? Not just the content, but the experience of it, the tone and feel. Often the terror one feels comes not from what happens in the dream but from the dread of what you expect to happen. You feel yourself surrounded by mortal danger, impending death, evil, an awareness or knowledge of things not spelled out in the dream but that – in the way of dreams – you just happen to know. Like...that there's a vampire in the house. Notice, also, that bad dreams are often quiet. Your dreams don't have a score.

I don't know what works for others but Dracula evokes exactly that experience for me, due in no small part to the lack of music in the film. The effect is unintended, the choice not to score the film a practical one, but the effect is there all the same. If you're familiar with the dream experience I'm talking about try watching Dracula at one in he morning with the lights out, without the score Phillip Glass wrote for it, and see if it doesn't feel creepily familiar. It's a talky film, too, just like the most excruciating of bad dreams – you drone when you want to scream, shamble when you want to run.

The copy I watched was the 75^th anniversary edition DVD, on my new HDTV. I've never seen it look so good. Karl Freund's cinematography is consistent throughout the production, from the Carpathians in the night fog to the night life of London or the estate of Seward's sanitarium in Whitby. The camerawork is subdued but never static or setbound: simply, it's about the ambiance more than the movement. Friend and the set decorators create a living space with deep blacks, strategic whites, and subtle grays. There's real depth of space onscreen: check out the gorgeous scene of the “mysterious Lady in White” walking through the foliage and other outdoors shots in the films' latter half (no one complains of the opening sequence in Transylvania for good reason) or the textured murk of the dungeons that seem to go on forever. In older copies the interior of Seward's mansion came across as flat, and the scenes duller for it. This restoration was a revelation, now it's a space that's fluid and expansive and enhancing the dream quality: I can feel the other rooms of the house and the potential for unseen that's within them, dark deeds taking place where no one's looking.

Casting Lugosi was a bold move. He had proven popular in the role on stage already, especially with the women, but it's a risky (risque) departure to present a vampire with such undeniable sex appeal. I can't imagine how heady this might have been for Thirties' audiences, with vampirism already tacitly understood to be a sexual transgression but this time involving not a monstrous parody of humanity but a sex symbol that had women swooning. Lugosi was hired for just that appeal. Take note, you who think recent adaptations have erred in casting attractive, romantic leads! His presence is undeniable. His Count has the supreme self-confidence of unquestioned nobility.

Of course, Dwight Frye is the other standout. As Renfield he's a nervous wreck full of rapidly shifting moods, nervous amusement, sudden fits of threatening mania. His terrible sick titter is unforgettable as his mad eyes leer up the hatchway - “Eh-hnh-hnh-hnh-hnh-hnh-hnh-hnhhhh-h-h-h-h!” If the rest of the cast lack for excitement, Frye makes up for all of them.

I've grown less fond of Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing over the years (though I love him in Frankenstein and Freund's The Mummy). Stokers' character is marked by a profound compassion for all he encounters, and I don't see that at all in Van Sloan's portrayal. Not does he do a very good job convincing Harker that they face a supernatural being. If you tell people that the man they just met is a vampire and they say there's no such thing, repeating 'but he's undead!' isn't a winning argument. Still, he does exude a steadfast authority – the scene of his confrontation with Dracula is still strong, and it helps that Harker is a dull-witted drip. Helen Chandler as Mina...not my favorite but her face does have a strange allure when she vamps out.

There are nice touches throughout, like the nonchalant way Dracula leaves the dead flowergirl behind, Dracula walking through a web without breaking it, the vampiric bee. Determine the scale of the bee's coffin by the stones on the wall it sits against: that is a human-sized bee, predating Argento's mantis for sheer WTFness. Making a tiny coffin for a bee might be a believable whimsy, but who crafts a scale stone wall to go with it?

I love this movie more than ever. It's far from a nostalgia thing.