“Dirty, Slimy Freaks!” Tod Browning was then, I argue, an artist whose social conscience and personal preoccupations led him in 1932 to approach Freaks as an allegory of the eugenics age; but what in the film and its production supports ...

Browning’s Themes and Personal History Reality vs. appearance (physical beauty masking perversity) is one of the key themes in Browning’s work. Another is sexual frustration and emasculation. These themes lie at the very heart of Freaks. As Stuart Rosenthal wrote ...

In his autobiography, Moving Pictures, the playwright Budd Schulberg described film director Tod Browning during the filming of Freaks (1932): There was a certain gleam in the way Tod Browning went about making this picture that made us think of ...